A colleague in Israel passed along the following, and I just had to put it here.  It’s both accurate and humorous:

Thanks to YF for sending.

To any of you that (like me) owned one of these, please to enjoy.  Thanks to Mike L. for the 100% pure awesomeness.

Today Bill Brenner, Senior Editor at CSO Online, had a run-in with the Secret Service after taking some pictures of Marine One and enjoying his passion for history while down in DC to cover Metricon5. If you haven’t read his coverage of the incident he posted an opinion piece on CSO Online: What it’s Like to be Grilled by the Secret Service, and also a personal piece, How to Test Your Recovery, Secret Service Style, in his OCD Diaries.

This reminded us of an incident that happened last summer in Saint Petersburg. We were at Pulkovo International Airport waiting for a flight down to Moscow.

We were on an early flight and the security scanners weren’t open yet. So while we were shuffling around the entrance waiting for it to open we noticed that there was a rug in front of one of the scanners that had some zany footsteps and the tagline “Rhumba the Lindstrom Way” on it. We’re friends and colleagues with Pete Lindstrom, Research Director of Spire Security, and thought to ourselves, “hey, wouldn’t it be cool to take a photo of that rug to show to Pete?”

Ed took out our camera and snapped a couple of nice shots of the rug and we were feeling pretty pleased when a very large and serious man came over from the security area, leaned into Ed, and said something stern sounding.

Ed, feeling friendly, said: “We have a friend named Lindstrom, we think he’ll get a kick out of this photo!” and showed the snap on the camera to the large, imposing security person.

Security person: {unintelligible but stern sounding command}

Ed: “It’s a photo for our friend.”

Security person: {unintelligible but stern sounding command}

Ed (getting nervous): “Umm, it’s a photo?”

Security person: {unintelligible but stern sounding command}

Diana (starting to shake, as realization dawned): “Ed, I think he said ‘delete.’”

Ed: “Delete?”

Security person (leaning in closer and getting angry): {unintelligible but getting louder stern sounding command}

Diana: “Aigh! He’s saying ‘delete’ – Ed – Delete! Delete!! DELETE!!”

At this point we both had visions of being thrown into a Russian jail in Siberia and never heard from again as we realized that they thought we’d been taking recon photos of the airport security system.

Ed: “Delete?” (Hands shaking – he tries to delete – admittedly I was also trying to delete the photo and really, it’s a job best accomplished by one person. Finally, the photo was deleted.)

Ed (showing camera to security person): “Deleted!”

Security person (no longer angry): {unintelligible grumph}

International incident averted we boarded the plane to Moscow.

Though we didn’t see another “Rhumba” floor rug, we did find another Lindstrom rug at an airport in Sweden, nowhere near security, where were able to snap a shot for posterity.

In light of SANS raising the Infocon threat status to yellow because of the Shortcut attack,  Diana has repaired our own humble alert status monitor (that got broken when we changed blogging software).  The level is still where it always is (i.e.”up to 11“), but now the images work again.  So please to enjoy the newly-fixed “Horrific Catastrophe Yousa-People-Gonna-Die TerrorMonger Alert Con“.

Came across this today (from here) and couldn’t resist passing it along.  Please to enjoy the security humor.

In an effort to get our cat, Mr. Wooster, his fifteen minutes of fame, we’ve submitted his holiday photo from last year to the Cheezburger Network.

If you’re a member of the network and want to help Mr. Wooster out by voting, or captioning, please click on over to his picture page at icanhascheezburger.com.

Courtesy of the “Make your own Sam and Max Comic” over at Telltale games. New Sam and Max in just under 10 days!

If you haven’t been there yet, giveusallyourmoney.com is funny. Thanks to John for passing it along… it keeps getting funnier each and every time I see it. Also, courtesy of the Onion, the bogus statement from the National Cryptography and Information Security Council was funny too.

Clearly, RSA’s marketing has received a serious shot in the arm since the merger. Billing themselves nowadays as the “security division of EMC”, they’ve been sending out all sorts of email invitations over the past few weeks: invitations to view their blog entries, invitations to listen to their podcasts, and most recently, an invitation to attend a live seminar about PCI. Now, normally this kind of thing wouldn’t be blog-worthy, but their statistical lead-in caught my eye. Check it out and see if anything about it strikes you as unusual:

FACT: Over 85% of Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard audit failures are in the area of data security.

Since it is the “data security standard”, I have to confess that it doesn’t really surprise me that the lion’s share of the issues are related to data security. But the part that does really make me curious is what the other 15 percent are related to…