Lag Tuesday

from here and here

It's not just the games themselves. Everything is slower to respond on that one day of the month. Even in the background, updates still interfere with what you're doing. It's a shame that keeping up to date slows everything down.

Black Hat board game

Watch on YouTube

Sometimes a picture alone isn't enough to decide whether you want a thing. I think that's especially true of something like a board game. You really need to see it in action to get a feel for it, and this video review of Black Hat the board game seems to accomplish just that.

How can you hate the kernel driver?

from here

It's amazing to me that, in 2020, video game developers will go to such lengths to fight cheaters that it starts to be reminiscent of malware.

PBS' NOVA Labs On Cyber Security

This video from PBS' NOVA Labs is a pretty good explanation of hackers and hacking. Turns out they did a few more as part of an educational series on cyber security. In fact, they've even made a game. Thanks to Chris Wysopal for bringing it to my attention.

XSS Game

click here to go to the game

Since the recent twitter worm has put XSS into the news, now seems like a great time to point out this web-based game (apparently made by folks at Google) that teaches you XSS.

snowden leaks: the game

play the game

now, don't get me wrong, i like the idea of this game, but if it were me i don't think i'd have made the hero look so dastardly.

being a defender can be fun

cursed treasure 2 (via ghacks)

one of the things tower defense games teach you is that no defensive measure works in all situations or against all adversaries.

veracode has found a weakness

found on veracode's site

veracode has found my weakness - for tower defense games. have fun trying to be productive for the rest of the day.

the malware invasion game

if you've got a long enough memory you'll probably notice that i posted about this video last year. however, what i failed to realize at the time was that that was just the introductory sequence to a web-based video game made by panda called the malware invasion.

the game has 2 levels. the first involves intercepting various threats from various vectors before they get into your PC, but as the volume of incoming materials increase you'll probably find you rely more and more on the magic anti-virus button rather than being able to intercept the threats on your own.

the second level is more of a timed quiz where you're asked whether a variety of scenarios are safe or not - prompting you to think about when and how much you should trust during your day to day computer use.

at the end of the day/game, of course, they're still trying to move product. panda is a security vendor, that's what they do. that doesn't mean this little bit of edu-tainment can't still be an interesting and enlightening diversion, though.

infect evolve repeat

this silly little web game about viruses has been one of my favourite time killers for years now. go figure.

one of the ideas that gets bandied around in security circles is the notion that defenders need to think more like attackers. the argument being that defenders would be more successful if they could better anticipate how attackers act, what they target, and thus where our weak points really are.

i'd like to turn that on it's head and i think this game serves as a pretty good demonstration. i think we should examine the ways in which attackers need to think like defenders. they want their attacks to succeed so they need to do various things to defend their efforts. things like making their attack tools and techniques more immune to counter attack (immunity is one of the characteristics in the game that you can power up), or increasing the fault tolerance of their attack platform by adding redundancy (the game allows you to increase the reproduction rate of your virus so that your virus can become many viruses), or even reduce the window of exposure during which an attack is at it's most vulnerable (the latency characteristic in the game refers to how long your virus stays trapped within a cell where you can't move it out of the way when something dangerous comes near). these are the sorts of things one needs to think about in order to create or select effective countermeasures.

can you spot any more parallels between how attackers and defenders operate?

anti-phishing phil

i originally heard about this through the stop badware blog but since then their link has gone dead and the project has been commercialized by wombat security. frankly, i think games are a really good way of teaching security concepts. they engage people in ways that other media simply can't.