Bob Gourley

Duqu is a stealthy computer virus with a hidden agenda... Everything that you need to know about Duqu: Duqu was reported to antivirus vendors around the 14th of October, 2011, but it has been in the wild since November of 2010. Since then there have been varients (updated copies with additional features or upgrades to code) released. It has been billed as the next Stuxnet, the son of Stuxnet, or a Stuxnet clone. In reality, Duqu is actually more like a payload of Stuxnet rather than the entire attack campagin, because it is a backdoor package dropped via other means. The reason why Stuxnet was considered to be so advanced was in large part because of its varied numbers of unpatched exploits that it used to ensure successful infection. Lets take a look at the similarities: Duqu uses code segments that can be identical to or very close to those used in the Stuxnet pa... (more)

Announcing the CTOvision Podcast Series

By BobGourley CTOvision.com, a blog focused on the needs of interprise decision-makers, provides technology context and assessments via newsletters, blog posts, white papers and social media feeds. With this post we are announcing our latest offering, a podcast series which captures content you can listen to on the go.   One of the great things about a podcast is you can listen while in your car. Once you subscribe to a feed it is automatically updated in your device. So you can get updates and track tech trends, reports and commentary during your commute. Our feeds are avail... (more)

Leveraging The FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool (CAT) To Improve Corporate Culture and Raise Security Posture

Bob Gourley The FFIEC (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council) is a formal interagency body empowered to prescribe uniform principles, standards, and report forms for the federal examination of financial institutions by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and to make recommendations to promote uniformity in the supervision of financial instit... (more)

How Platfora Is Transforming Hadoop

When talking with the less-technical people in your enterprise, which may include end users and many others on the leadership team, it always pays to have non technical expressions to describe new capabilities. Here are some thoughts on Platfora that may be of use in discussions like that. Here is how to describe Platfora to a non-technical person: Platfora gives users a better ability to interact with information. They can ask their own questions, follow their own theories, run their own “what-if” scenarios, and ask unbounded questions in iterative ways over their data. To a us... (more)

Chrome Netbook OS; Tablet PCs; LBS; Open Source

2010 will undoubtedly be a year of technology innovation. In 2009, Twitter revolutionized the way we get news, it brought us closer to those who were a part of the news, almost making traditional media irrelevant. I don’t know who (or what) will be the Twitter of 2010, but below are a few predictions for the coming year. Google’s Chrome Netbook OS will be a hit. Their OS will mostly be dependent on a Google Account. A Google Account opens up their full Google Apps suite, which includes email, calendar, word processing, and MS Office like functions. Google’s renditions of their c... (more)