TALPA strides forward

TALPA strides forward

Posted Aug 29, 2008 1:21 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
Parent article: TALPA strides forward

> Eric Paris proposed a fairly straightforward—though still somewhat controversial—model for the threats that TALPA is supposed to handle.

It sounds like the threat model TALPA is designed for is actually a social engineering attack: AV vendors using "marketing" to convince companies to install poorly-engineered kernel-kluging software, with predictable results on reliability, support load, etc.

A cleaner approach would be to patch IT managers to be more resistant to this class of marketing attacks, but given the difficulty of field-upgrading such units and the poor success of previous attempts to fix this problem (non-execuacceptable gift policies, administrator phone number randomization, etc.), the threat mitigation provided by TALPA may represent a reasonable medium-term compromise.

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TALPA strides forward

Posted Aug 30, 2008 5:02 UTC (Sat) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

A cleaner approach would be to patch IT managers to be more resistant to this class of marketing attacks, but given the difficulty of field-upgrading such units and the poor success of previous attempts to fix this problem (non-execuacceptable gift policies, administrator phone number randomization, etc.),

Okay, I just snorted water from laughing so hard.