Is security a washing machine?

Most security appliance vendors use fluffy charts with a 4 step “information risk management” cycle. It’s always a 4 step cycle, like Symantec’s DLP  “Discover, Monitor, Protect and Manage” and it’s usually on a circular chart but sometimes in a Gartner-style magic quadrant or on a line. It’s like a washing machine cycle that never […]

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 […]

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.  […]

Choosing a data loss prevention solution

Data security is not one-size fits all. For example, if the threat scenario is an attack on your customer self-service Web application – obfuscating or encrypting fields in database tables is not an effective security countermeasure;  you need a network DLP solution to prevent leaks of clear text data and a software security assessment that […]

Social networking business models

A colleague who has a startup in the US for social networking for doctors was whining to me the other day that advertising business models are dead for everyone except the top 5-10 Internet properties like Yahoo and Google. He said that Google does a great job of aggregating ads from small Web site but […]

What is a DLP solution?

These days everyone has a DLP solution – it’s like a Dilbert cartoon. The latest and definitely most effective DLP product is – you guessed it – the venerable Cheyenne Arcserve Backup. I got this in the email today. THIS FEATURED DOWNLOAD SPONSORED BY: CA IT Problem: IT managers are expected to withstand a wide […]

Very large scale digital asset collections

The next age of discovery is upon us it seems. A digital arms race has been heating up in recent years as companies pour millions into large-scale digitization projects, including Microsoft’s effort to scan 80,000 books at the British Library and IBM’s multimillion-dollar project to create a virtual version of China’s Forbidden City By taking […]

Imperfect knowledge security

Keeping the organization robust in a highly dynamic threat environment Our capacity to predict will be confined to . . . general characteristics of the events to be expected and not include the capacity for predicting particular individual events. . .Yet the danger of which I want to warn is precisely the belief that in […]

Pharmas, Web 2.0 and regulation

For a change – ethics based regulation that differentiates between the medium and the message. Dr. Jean Ah Kang, works at DDMAC and is in charge of Web 2.0 policy development. She speaks very well at her interview with  Mark Senak, a regulatory affairs lawyer ( eyeonfda.com ).  Here is the podcast:  FDA’s views and […]

Designing a data security system

User-Driven Design versus User-Centered design Alan Cooper, in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, draws a distinction between user-centered design and user-driven design. User-driven design is about collecting, prioritizing and implementing a system to the user requirements – we’ve all been seen software development projects where the requirements spiraled out of control and […]