On this week’s episode of Security Nation, we had the pleasure of speaking with Rob Graham, the founder of Errata Security Consultancy, well-known security blogger, and soon-to-be book author. Our podcast highlights guests who have taken on a challenge that has advanced security in some way, and Rob’s work in developing BlackICE and now writing a security textbook are perfect examples of this.
Here is our recap of the podcast:
Behind the scenes of BlackICE
Twenty years ago, Rob created BlackICE, an intrusion prevention system (IPS) that detects and blocks intrusions. Eventually, it was purchased by IBM. If you were in cybersecurity 20 years ago, you likely used it on your desktop, but upon its acquisition, it went where most apps that IBM acquires go: the IBM graveyard.
Rob explained that the name BlackICE came from William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” book. “ICE” stands for Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics, and because that was pretty much what he was building, the name seemed fitting. However, Rob felt guilty about using a name created by another author, and one day William Gibson tweeted about how people lift product names from his book all the time, but most aren’t successful. Someone replied that BlackICE was actually wildly successful, so Rob chimed in that all these years he had been feeling guilty about taking the name. Gibson wrote back to him “If you just buy me a new MacBook, we’ll call it good”… and so Rob did just that.
During our interview, Rob talked about technical breakthroughs achieved with BlackICE, such as user mode network drivers. At the time, everyone thought you needed to put everything in the kernel for performance, he did the opposite by putting everything in user space, including the har ..
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