Privacy: Features

I'm a CISO who has worked in the US financial services industry both as a regulator and for a large services company. In this column I'm going to let you in on one of the biggest, dirtiest secrets in the industry: The companies that get the least amount of scrutiny from financial regulators actually present some of the greatest risks for systemic financial market manipulation and fraud. I'm talking about financial news and brokerage service companies.

A fierce and prominent opponent of the Hawke government's 1987 plans to introduce a national identity card says nothing has changed technologically in the intervening years that would make a smart card today any more secure than the Australia Card proposed then.

E-mail is mission-critical to your business - and its worst security nightmare

Back in 2001 Peter Piper picked a pack of Privacy Principles, but thus far no one's found themselves in much of a pickle.

As American angst over their government's massive domestic spying program soars, the Victorian Privacy Commissioner has warned responsible handling of personal information will increasingly require deft application of the "best custodian principle".

Organization after organization has disclosed that critical data banks have been compromised by hackers, couriers or consultants. The causes range from lost backup tapes to lost laptops to network hacks. What most of these cases have in common is the lack of strong technical measures to protect data that is by its nature highly sensitive.

State transit authorities in the US have been including surveillance cameras in the design of their newest train stations for security reasons. But as one state discovered, the technology delivers other benefits too . . .

IBM Chief Privacy Officer Harriet Pearson does the right thing.

It's a topic of fierce debate among high-tech cognoscenti: What's more secure -- "open source" code such as Linux and Apache, or proprietary "closed source" operating systems and applications, Microsoft's in particular?

CSOs will very likely live to see the day when human brains are easily augmentable through an array of knowledge implants, apps and Wi-Fi capabilities. If securing an enterprise seems tricky today, imagine installing firewalls in a few thousand employees' prefrontal lobes.

Cleaning dirty data is not just a matter of mastering the technical challenges. It requires making sure your staff is working closely with the business every step of the way