Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: The DoJ and SEC Are Coming
There is compliance to industry regulation like PCI DSS 1.2 which is aimed at consumer protection and then there is compliance to government regulation like the FCPA which is aimed at maintaining a high ethical level of behavior and ensuring a level playing field of business. For a large global company like Monsanto, Merck or […]
Data discovery and organization
The problem is that you know where you start, you don’t know where you finish and you will always have trouble organizing the useful references you collect on the way. After a call with a client, I started investigating how to provide high value scientific data in a social network for doctors and medical representatives […]
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 […]
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 […]
Israeli software innovation
Saw this item on the Israeli Export Institute Web site – unfortunately the article quoted on redorbit.com doesn’t exist anymore. Someone didn’t pay their advertising bill? As a special tribute to the Israeli software industry, while the state of Israeli celebrates its 60th anniversary, the redorbit.com website sums up some of the major achievements of […]
Preventing intellectual property abuse
One of my pet peeves with security vendors like Symantec, Vontu, Websense and Checkpoint is marketing collateral that totally disregards the basics of security – it’s like they hired an English major straight out of school and told them to start writing. Sensitive assets, confidential assets, proprietary assets – you can make a total mishmash […]
Why do people commit crimes?
The president of a prospect was recently discussing with us whether Oracle IRM (information rights management) was a good way of preventing data loss, and a viable alternative to a DLP (data loss prevention) system. Rights management would appear at first blush to be orthogonal to data loss prevention but it’s an interesting question that […]
A strategic inflection point in the security industry
Compliance is like being at all the rehearsals with a sharp pencil and playing your part perfectly – but not showing up to the gig. Being inside a strategic inflection point of change is like waking up during your own murder. Inside a strategic inflection point of change, the people inside the system are not […]
Fraud, energy derivatives trading
Fraud has become a big issue in energy derivatives trading. A former Bank of Montreal (BMO) natural gas trader pled guilty in November 2008 to intentionally mismarking trades, resulting in over $800 million of fraud-related trading losses. The interesting part in the item on EmpireStateNews.Net was that that the natural gas trader pleaded guilty to […]
Nihilistic security
Nihilism asserts that objective morality does not exist: therefore – there is no objective moral value with which to uphold a rule or to logically prefer one action over another. The wave of the liberal left which swept Western Europe and is now growing in US as the Obama administration takes office, asserts that there […]
