Pharmaceuticals and Kirby vacuums: The last bastions of door-to-door sales?
My research article on “Social software – Reconstructing the market boundaries of pharmaceutical sales” was published on the rapidly growing UK healthcare site PharmaPhorum yesterday – one of my first forays outside the data security space in a long time but a direction with a potential to make a big change in the way pharmas […]
Free agent DLP from Sophos
Sophos has announced that they will soon include endpoint data loss prevention functionality in their anti-virus software. Developed in-house, Sophos will have an independent offering – unlike Websense, RSA, Symantec, Trend Micro and McAfee (who all purchased DLP technology) and have integrated it into their product lines with various levels of success (or not). The […]
Risk in IT
Dissonance between IT and security management. Mark Brewer wrote a thoughtful post on Risk in IT – I liked his use of the term “resilient organizations”, although I have been using the term “robust organizations”. The semantic difference between robustness and resilience may be related to the difference between IT and security management world-views. “Risk […]
The cost of HIPAA privacy violations
Back in February 09 I noted that CVS Caremark Corp. had agreed to pay $2.25 million to settle a federal investigation into allegations that it violated HIPAA privacy regulations when pharmacy employees threw items such as pill bottles with patient information into the trash. This morning, 9 months later – I checked the stock […]
The death of Google Adwords
I don’t really understand why anyone would want to pay Google money for Adwords. I ran a little experiment recently to promote our web sites using Google Adwords and Twitter. Here are the results: The results of my little online marketing experiment show a huge advantage for Twitter with focused search phrases in bios over […]
The Americanization of IT Research
The Burton Group have released the results of their research that concludes that Symantec (Vontu), RSA (Tablus) and Websense (Port Authority) are the leading DLP vendors. Burton’s choice is indicative of the Americanization of the information security space, where government compliance regulation and large security vendor marketing agendas appear to drive US customer security decisions. […]
Security is not about adding value – Security is about protecting your ability to add value
People sometimes ask me what I do (my Dad, who is 85, reads my blog so he knows already). If it’s a neighbor, I’ll say – “I work in computers”, if it’s an IT person – I might say – “I work in information security” and if it’s a security colleague – I will say […]
DLP – a Disturbing Lack of Process?
Ted Ritter has suggested that we rename DLP a Disturbing Lack of Process Indeed DLP is not a well-defined term – since so many vendors (Kaspersky anti-virus, McAfee anti-virus, Symantec anti-virus, Trend Micro Provilla, CA Backup…you name it) have labeled their products “Data loss prevention” products in an attempt to turn the tide of data […]
Jennifer Lopez Joins the Fight Against Pertussis
Help protect your baby by protecting yourself. Our daughter and son-in-law stayed with us over the weekend recently – listening to one of the babies cough, I realized that there is a lot more to life than enterprise information protection and cost-effective data loss prevention.
SMB are at risk for fraudulent transactions
Since we often relate to the security of a business through the eyes of our personal data security – it may come of a surprise that a SMB is exposed to data security threats where a personal card holder is protected.
