The SANS Holiday hacking challenge

The SANS guys have developed a pretty impressive holiday-themed hacking challenge. Speaking as someone who creates crisis management table-top exercise scenarios as part of my job, I'm always impressed by the level of effort and details that goes into creating these challenges.

Even if you don't have the type of skills required to participate in a challenge like this, you can still benefit from  it, by using it as a chance to get inside the mind of an attacker and think like "they" think.
Then, continue in that mindset and turn your attention to your own organization's network. How would you attack it if you were inclined to - what would you target?

Your own security program will benefit if you start to think like this.

Security mindset

Interesting article about the mindset of security practitioners - thanks to Bruce Schneier for highlighting this one.

Backdoor in industrial control system

With all of the recent focus on SCADA vulnerabilities and critical infrastructure protection, how does something like this happen?? RuggedCom appears to have been totally dismissive of the fundamental vulnerability reported to them.
RuggedCom was bought by Siemens in March 2012.