Product counterfeiting in aerospace industry

This seems to be my weekend for  product counterfeiting.   I was in Tel Aviv last week on Dizengoff and picked up a couple of paperbacks at the “Book Junkie” bookstore for 5 sheqels/book (that’s about $1.25!) – one of them was Michael Crichtons’ novel Airframe (The book is genuine… and they have an amazing collection […]

Drug counterfeiting, hype or health?

Counterfeiting is a hot issue not only because it hits vendors in the pocket but because of the public health/safety implications. Product counterfeiting ranges from fashion, such as Dolce & Gabbana handbags,  high performance bike frames such as Specialized Bikes to faking innovative drugs such as Viagra. The Israeli onlline business daily “The Marker” recently […]

The death of age in market segmentation

I first got wind that age as a marketing segmentation parameter was becoming much less relevant about 3 years ago when I paid a sales call to Castro Model ( a big Israeli fashion house with a chain of retail stores)  to try and sell them a data loss prevention solution from Fidelis Security Systems.  […]

Three simple ways of preventing data loss

When I was a solid state physics grad student at Bar Ilan, I had two advisors – Prof. Nathan Aviezer and Prof. Moshe Kaveh (who is now the President of the university).     Aviezer was fond of saying that he only does simple things. I was calculating electrical conductivity of aluminum at low temperatures and due […]

Simplicity and technical superiority

In today’s environment of financial crisis, the tradeoff managers  usually make is coverage against cost.   IT and corporate management are more concerned with reducing outsourcing  costs and cutting back on  professional services instead of achieving and sustaining technical excellence in security and compliance.   Technical superiority in  IT security will not enlarge your market share or […]

Data security and the sin of hubris

Hayek wrote in his Nobel lecture – “I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge. . . to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.” One of the biggest sins of man is hubris. The Obama administration is guilty of hubris. As an American living outside the US in the […]

Chrome OS – not the next big thing

According to a post on the official Google blog – Google will be launching Google Chrome OS to consumers in H2 2010. Reading through the post I saw a few interesting  points that got me thinking: Functionality trumps startup speed We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you […]

The role of DLP in IP protection

A common conversation I have with my technology clients  touches on patent protection as a  security countermeasure against abuse of intellectual property. The short answer is that if you’re not DuPont or Roche, then patent protection is not going to help you very much. If you develop software , you are probably infringing  someone’s patents […]

Data loss prevention at work – video and porn

Bahya ibn Paquda was the author of the first Jewish system of ethics written in Arabic in 1040 under the title Al Hidayah ila Faraid al-Qulub, Guide to the Duties of the Heart. In his view, most people acted in accord with selfish, worldly motives. This was almost 2,000 years ago before the age of […]

Data loss prevention for SME

Is a SME like the old German expression – Kleine Kinder kleine Sorgen, große Kinder große Sorgen? “Small children, small problems, big children, big problems”? I wanted to call this post “The need to understand operational risk of information security” – but I realised that op risk is a concept used by big banks and […]