There’s a quick one page recap from Gartner about the 2008 security software vendor market-share breakdown.  As in 2007 Symantec is still clearly the market leader with 22% (falling 2% from 2007).  In second place is McAfee with 10%.

Not surprisingly the area with the most growth is SIEM -  security information and event management.  As everyone is preaching, including the maker of Snort, most companies have monitoring in place and are generating anywhere from a hundred to a hundred thousand events a week but more times than not NO ONE IS MONITORING THESE EVENTS.

Read the complete market-share breakdown here: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1031712

I was recently lucky enough to attend a talk by Sourcefire CTO Martin Roesch (creator of Snort).  He mentioned the Cybertrust Breach report which is wotrh a read.

One of the interesting facts is that the time from an initial breach of a network to compromising data is in MINUTES 27% of the time and in HOURS 21% of the time.  This is very startling data.  What the report concludes as well as Mr. Roesch is that folks aren’t monitoring their logs.  Almost everyone is running IDS/IPS these days and generating thousands of events but no one is actually watching them.  I’ll post a review of Martin’s talk in the next few days.

In the meantime you can find the 2009 breach report here.

I’m reading Bruce Schneier’s “Schneier on Security” which is a collection of his best essays and articles. One interesting item I came across was the mention of Fraud Alerts.  People registered with the US credit agencies (Transunion, Equifax, Experian) can request a free 90 day fraud alert.  After 90 days you can go ahead and sign up again forever and ever.

The fraud alert forces potential credit grantors to verify your identification before extending credit in your name in case someone is using your information without your consent.  Say goodbye to those credit card offers in the mail…

***You only need to sign up with one of the agencies below.  They are required by law to notify the other two agencies.

Sign up @ Experian

Sign up @ Equifax

*Unfortunately I can’t locate the TransUnion sign up page. Please let me know if you have better luck.