John Pescatore Quotations

Vendors have not always been in synch about what is the best way to offer security functions to handheld device users.

Security is important for cell phones because it is much more likely that a user will lose that device than a laptop or desktop computer.

From the experimenting stage, it moved to vandalism, and we had all these defacement attacks. After that, it became politically motivated and we kind of expected the next phase to be cyber-crime. That's the stage we're in today with these kinds of extortion attacks.

People who sell this data need to have a verification system, and they don't. The enforcement is lax.

Microsoft has so many patches it really has developed the industry-leading way of dealing with patches. We're definitely seeing many vendors moving to more predictable patch release.

The problem is the Webmasters control the Web server, ... There's no chance firewall software will survive on the server. Web server firewalls won't be widely used.

The problem is the Webmasters control the Web server,

Wall Street-type companies have done this sort of interoperability but typically under controlled conditions, ... What may look easy to Dean Witter may not look so easy to others, especially smaller companies.

We knew it was going to be at least 20 percent lower than competitors' prices. We didn't think they would dump it at a super-duper low price.

The Phone.com approach lets you get all the way to your application server.

The good news is the termites are no longer eating the bottom floor of your house. The bad news is they're eating top floor.

The open-source community hasn't learned to do bare-knuckle marketing yet. But every time Microsoft has these problems, it helps Linux in a very big way.

We don't want good-guy software to allow bad-guy software to take advantage of it. This was just bad software design by Symantec, as opposed to them trying to take advantage of the OS.

Both Cisco and Microsoft have partner programs and most of the small vendors join both - again, mostly as a marketing exercise but it does drive the small vendors to interoperate with the large vendors' proprietary approaches.

Federal money should be where the marketplace isn't working.

the rise of targeted attacks has poked big holes in a lot of companies' intrusion-detection strategies.

The spreading of the worm has slowed down slightly, but the real cost is going back and cleaning computers.

Princeton is definitely a really tough crew to beat. I think our crew rowed a race somewhere between OK and good -- I think they have a little bit more in them.

AES will likely not replace more than 30 percent of DES operations before 2004,

Back then, it was more a reaction to all these worms and viruses that would hit Windows, and Microsoft would get yelled at. Symantec's stock price would go up every time there was a virus.

They're going to lose market share, that's a given. But I bet they'll still be the market-share leader. They have that brand name, and so far have made acquisitions and aggressive schedules to stay ahead. But they have to execute.

the benefit back to them does not exceed the risk they perceive in making that information available.

That's a killer piece of plumbing that's built into Windows that does give Microsoft a huge advantage.

If Microsoft's security products are easier to use, we think consumers will be very happy to buy from Microsoft.

If you're afraid of 'back doors,' you better be testing all your software.

In this case, the person who is sending out the information is the one that's responsible.

Clipper was a heavy-handed way of forcing a particular design into things, and the reason Clipper failed is the same reasons that this will fail. Users lose out if cryptography is weakened or ineffective or much harder to use.

Gartner believes these factors will converge by the end of 2007.

The Linux community doesn't want to be seen as ambulance chasers. Companies that don't follow etiquette rules in security lose share.