Data Security: Features

While Willy Sutton never really said it, the truth is that people rob banks because that is where the money is. Today's criminals don't walk into banks with loaded guns and get-away drivers. Rather they connect from a remote location using a browser and are armed with hacking tools and spyware.

Protecting a corporate data center is like trying to keep an elephant safe from a swarm of flies. Despite your best efforts, bites happen. As the staples of security -- such as firewalls, antivirus software, spam and spyware filters -- come together in suites of products that allow for sophisticated management, there are other security tools either emerging or worth a rethink.

Shira Rubinoff was a practicing psychologist in 2004. When it came to technology, her experience was simply as a tech user, certainly not a tech guru. Then one day she was phished.

US military strategists, CIA analysts, international agency officials and Nobel Prize winning economists concur with the consensus of the world's scientific community: the Climate Crisis is a planetary security issue, as well as a national security issue for each of the one hundred ninety two countries that belong to the United Nations. But the Climate Crisis is also, by extension, a corporate security issue, as well as, yes, a cyber security issue.

I have conducted more security program assessments than I can remember over the past 15 years. Quite some time ago I conducted some of the first certification and accreditation efforts ever at the CIA. Those were interesting times. We had very little to go on and we tried to assess security controls to the few regulations and controls that existed at that time. By the time I left the federal space and started working almost exclusively in the commercial sector a number of security best practice standards had sprung up. Most recently, in the past 10 years or so, a slew of legislation pertaining to data security and privacy has given us more requirements with which to adhere.

The pace of mobilization within many enterprises is increasing rapidly. Enterprises of all sizes and types are finding that going mobile can significantly increase the productivity of their employees, bringing added flexibility and cost reductions and helping many companies gain a competitive edge in their market.

Business travelers will soon need to carry the name of their corporate lawyer in addition to their passport when traveling to the United States, and they may need to bring with them a different business laptop as well. This is because US Customs can search and confiscate your laptop without any prior cause, according to policies that have been posted online since a Ninth US Circuit Court ruling in April.

Computer networks in the academic world are a lot like the Wild West: It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad, and the sheriff's ability to maintain order is severely limited.

Thanks to all the fear over data security breaches, a computer recycling operation has morphed into something much bigger - and potentially more lucrative - for the Saraiva brothers.

Not long ago, the legal department at a financial services company in New York got a phone call from a hospital in London. The query: Why are you hacking us? With two known IP addresses, it wasn't difficult for the financial firm's information security staff to go back through the logs looking for traffic between the two organizations. And with the traffic identified, locating the computer from which the hacks were taking place didn't take long, either. The culprit: an individual who-as their human resources records soon confirmed-had formerly worked at that very hospital.

John had a massive challenge to tackle. A former IT security officer at a large bank in New York, he and his wife packed up and moved across the country so he could take on the role of chief security officer with a well-known provider of loans, retail financing, and other credit related products.