Maintaining a Balanced Perspective on Security Alerts
The US-CERT issued a warning to U.S. financial institutions about a possile series of denial of service attacks, according to ComputerWorld. Not long after, the same publication was quoting security analysts who argued the threat was overblown and former government officials defending the warning.
Johannes Ullrich chief technology officer at the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC) in Bethesda, Md was quoted "We did see the bulletin board post that triggered all of this ... The overall tone of the bulletin board is that of kids exchanging hacker tips. Things like software serial numbers, how to use some common tools like VNC and such,"
But the ComputerWorld article went with a quote from Howard Schmidt, former White House cybersecurity advisor who said "I think the DHS was very clear this was a non-credible source,"
The take away from this is that we need to read the fine print in any security warning, vulnerability notice or threat assessment otherwise we risk spending too much time on relatively low risk, low impact threats.
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