A great year for data thieves
The Verizon Business Report on data breaches 2009 was released – the data breach investigations report headlines with 285 million data records breached in 2008: 91% of attackers were organized crime 74% of attacks by malicious outsiders 67% of vulnerabilities due to system defects 32% implicated business partners The report must be particularly disturbing to […]
Creativity beats cheap outsourcing
Most Israeli high-tech workers (and most have not been fired) have enough disposable income, a reasonably interesting job and a fairly clueless boss that is even more interested than them in personal job security. Salaries and costs (with all the perks) of an engineer in Israel are as high as in the US. Creativity not […]
The Fallacies in Obama public policy
Look at this graph From the graph, we see that the GDP dropped dramatically from 1929 to 1932 despite fairly constant government spending on stimulus programs (although the graph does not tell the story of the jinking and shifting in the Roosevelt stimulus packages). The big uptick in GDP happened from 1935-1938 with no visible […]
Pilgrim Africa
It’s a very long story, and better not to ask how this happened; but one of my cousins is married to Calvin Echodu Executive Director, Pilgrim Africa. Calvin, who is a really nice guy, sent me an email recently – they’re working hard to stop a malaria epidemic in Uganda that got started after the […]
Getting managers out of denial
Maybe you have a manager in denial? I know the feeling -the absence of effective risk controls for data security often start with denial of vulnerabilities. Here is a true story: …I’m not concerned about data theft. We’ve outsourced our entire IT operation to a big bank’s data center and they’re up to speed on […]
Saving money and jobs
Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in a wonderful video on cutting costs and protecting low-wage workers on the PBS (Public Broadcasting System) channel in the US talks about how he got buy-in for change. Saved $16M and 450 jobs from layoffs. He outlines 4 steps for getting buyin for the […]
Changes in pharma sales
Poland is leading the way in Europe with a new law enacted as of December 1, 2008 that prohibits medical representatives from visiting doctors during business hours. Reps are a good source of spoon-fed science for docs, not to mention the free samples and perks at conferences. However – over 90,000 doctors in Poland have […]
Are you a leader or a friend?
Although I served in the Israeli Army – I was what they called a “simple soldier”, a communications tech in a van. Our officer was glad that we kept things working – and that was fair enough we thought. After grad school, serving in the armies of high-tech samurai, I learned that commanders fight with […]
Identity theft myths
Identity theft and data loss prevention have two dimensions: The firms who create, store and process data Consumers The media tends to confuse the two issues – promoting various public and private agendas (for example – security product vendors who want to inflate the cost of damage of identity theft by counting the cost to […]
The death of regulation
I recently ran into a 2 year old post that decried the use of the term extrusion prevention calling it the “worst tech term of the year” I will cut the author of the article some slack as it was back in 2007 and a lot of folks were just coming to grips with the […]
