From Mary Brown | October 23rd, 2009
Noah Shachtman at Wired.com reports on a business relationship between a segment of the CIA and an Internet company that uses specialized data mining tools to monitor the activity going on in the social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Personal privacy laws in the U.S. require the government to use discretion when violating the privacy of U.S. citizens. These social networking sites provide a huge amount of personal information that would not be available, were it not being offered up to the public.
Is this another example of where there is a tension between the potential benefit to security and the potential abuse of privacy? Do users of social networking sites fully understand what will happen to the data they post, and would they alter their behavior if they were made aware? Share your thoughts. Post a comment.
Tags: data mining, information, Internet, personal privacy laws, privacy, security, social networking
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From Mary Brown | September 25th, 2009
Toby Wolpe, of ZDNet UK writes about the commercial use of open source software and its impact on security. He discusses a solution that he argues is more secure.
Do you believe that the security profile of Nominum’s proprietary DNS solution is sufficiently superior to warrant the cost of moving away from freeware such as BIND?
How does this apply to the concept of the commercial use of open source software in general?
Tags: open source software, security, software
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From Mary Brown | September 8th, 2009
Ohigashi & Morii (2009) have published a research paper that increases the concern about the use of WPA encryption to protect data being transmitted via wireless networks. Wireless security is becoming a more pressing topic as mobile computing becomes more the norm.
How important do you think it really is to worry about using very robust security for wireless as opposed to just the run of the mill WEP or WPA? Do you think most organizations are creating architectures for their wireless solutions that are highly secure?
Why or why not? Tell us what you think.
Tags: mobile computing, security, wireless security
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From Mary Brown | June 29th, 2009
I have recently been attending a range of webinar meetings being held by federal and private healthcare stakeholders that are trying to get their arms around the Health IT mandates that are included in the Obama stimulus and health reform plans. The big cahuna in healthcare is the HIPAA security and privacy regulations that were meant to protect the private health information of individuals. READ ON
Tags: data exchange, healthcare, HIPPA, privacy, security, webinar
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From Dr. Steven Brown | May 27th, 2009
When discussing security, we normally think of things like policies, hacking, terrorism, etc. But the same attention is not given to our food supply.
Why? READ ON
Tags: agriculture crime, agriculture safety, security
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From Mary Brown | May 19th, 2009
Social networking tools have seen a fair amount of press lately to the ways in which hackers use these tools to commit crimes. PC Advisor reports a French hacker that gained administrative control of Twitter by compromising the account of an employee. That is what is known as an ‘adverse event’ in anyone’s world. PCWorld posted an article describing five different security problems involving Facebook in a single week, in March 2009.
Are you are protecting your organization from the threats that have come about through an increase in Web 2.0 applications and social networking sites?
Tell us what strategies you use to mitigate these risks.
Tags: PC Advisor, PC World, security, social networking, Twitter, Web 2.0
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From Mary Brown | March 30th, 2009
April 1, also known by many as April Fool’s Day, has typically been a day of widespread activity for those who write and propagate malicious code. This year is no different. Many of these Trojans, worms, and viruses have functionality that includes disabling personal firewalls and anti-virus or anti-spyware programs. It is important that information security professionals work to encourage the users within their professional and personal lives to double check their systems prior to April 1, 2009, to ensure that they will not contribute by allowing their systems to become bots or zombies. Below are some links that offer advice as to how to protect systems from being compromised.
Tags: malicious code, security, Trojans, virus, viruses, worms
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