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I wonder if it would be better opsec for security oriented companies to have policies that encourage employees not to reveal their employer. You have 3000+ karm

I wonder if it would be better opsec for security oriented companies to have policies that encourage employees not to reveal their employer. You have 3000+ karma with a significant posting history, which I think translates into an increased surface area for social engineering attacks. The more someone knows about you the more they could either find a way through you into the company, and eventually on to the servers. Like for instance you might reveal something in your posts that could be used to find out more about you online and eventually get access to your amazon account, or paypal account, or your gmail account and use this to get access to your work email or enough information to impersonate you or impersonate someone who pretends to know you, until eventually they get in and find access to things Silent Circle doesn't want people to access. Relevant: http://xkcd.com/538/ http://xkcd.com/538/

JshWright 12y ago
As with many things in life, it's a tradeoff... Does it help someone who is conducting recon on Silent Circle employees? Absolutely. But by the same token, we feel the fact that we do have employees who are active parts of communities like this is an asset. For that matter, communities like HN are a great asset to companies like us (we've had great success with the Who's Hiring threads). It wouldn't take much for someone to sort out my HN profile regardless of my disclaimer though. My HN username is the same as my GitHub username, which is linked to the Silent Circle organization.
- bellerocky 12y ago
  If you have private repos on GitHub, and lets say GitHub has a security vulnerability[1] that lets users post to private repos it probably would be better if malicious people who knew that their target used Silent Circle didn't know you were on GitHub. Which I didn't, until you just mentioned it. Why are you on GitHub? [1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/hacker-commandeers-github-to-prove-vuln-in-ruby/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/hacker-commandeers-g...
  - JshWright 12y ago
    We don't host any private repos at GitHub. I'm on GitHub because we release the sources of our clients and because we use several open source libraries in our stack and it's very impractical to push changes upstream if you don't have a GitHub account. I could certainly do that anonymously, but again... tradeoffs. It's more convenient for me to do it from my primary account (which makes me more likely to do it) and there are advantages to publicly sharing that we give back to projects that we use. Do you think someone doing a recon on a target like a developer at Silent Circle _wouldn't_ check for a GitHub profile? EDIT: Dunno who is downvoting you. You raise very valid points (ones that we have had many conversations about), and have been very cordial...
sbierwagen 12y ago
1.) Security theater. The hypothetical competent attacker already knows who works for Silent Circle, from any one of a dozen different public sources. No company that actually accepts money from customers can be stealth enough. 2.) Mere access to a security company's internal network isn't as useful as it would be for, example, a credit card processor's internal network. (Except for stealing secret keys, etc) The more serious threat is not intrusion, but tampering. (Pretending to be a employee for sneaky NSA-style RNG-weakening, etc) Covert tampering is a heck of a lot harder.

JshWright 12y ago

As with many things in life, it's a tradeoff... Does it help someone who is conducting recon on Silent Circle employees? Absolutely. But by the same token, we feel the fact that we do have employees who are active parts of communities like this is an asset. For that matter, communities like HN are a great asset to companies like us (we've had great success with the Who's Hiring threads). It wouldn't take much for someone to sort out my HN profile regardless of my disclaimer though. My HN username is the same as my GitHub username, which is linked to the Silent Circle organization.

bellerocky 12y ago
If you have private repos on GitHub, and lets say GitHub has a security vulnerability[1] that lets users post to private repos it probably would be better if malicious people who knew that their target used Silent Circle didn't know you were on GitHub. Which I didn't, until you just mentioned it. Why are you on GitHub? [1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/hacker-commandeers-github-to-prove-vuln-in-ruby/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/hacker-commandeers-g...
- JshWright 12y ago
  We don't host any private repos at GitHub. I'm on GitHub because we release the sources of our clients and because we use several open source libraries in our stack and it's very impractical to push changes upstream if you don't have a GitHub account. I could certainly do that anonymously, but again... tradeoffs. It's more convenient for me to do it from my primary account (which makes me more likely to do it) and there are advantages to publicly sharing that we give back to projects that we use. Do you think someone doing a recon on a target like a developer at Silent Circle _wouldn't_ check for a GitHub profile? EDIT: Dunno who is downvoting you. You raise very valid points (ones that we have had many conversations about), and have been very cordial...

sbierwagen 12y ago

1.) Security theater. The hypothetical competent attacker already knows who works for Silent Circle, from any one of a dozen different public sources. No company that actually accepts money from customers can be stealth enough. 2.) Mere access to a security company's internal network isn't as useful as it would be for, example, a credit card processor's internal network. (Except for stealing secret keys, etc) The more serious threat is not intrusion, but tampering. (Pretending to be a employee for sneaky NSA-style RNG-weakening, etc) Covert tampering is a heck of a lot harder.