Charged for stealing 130 million credit card numbers
A Miami man has been charged with the largest data theft ever. Less than 5 years ago, the main modus operandi for stealing identity information was dumpster diving. If you shredded your statements, you were safe. However – today, it’s much more effective to steal the data directly from large retailer databases. Once you’re in […]
Trusted insider threats, fact and fiction
Richard Stiennon is a well known and respected IT analyst – he has a blog called IT Harvest. A recent post had to do with Trusted insider threats.Despite the length of the article, I believe that the article has a number of fundamental flaws: Overestimating the value of identity and access management in mitigating trusted […]
Who is the key person in your security organization
In the late 80’s I was a hyperactive programmer at a small VAX/VMS software house. We were group of 5 programmers – we had some nice accounts – like Intel, and National Semiconductor, Hadassah Hospital and Amdocs, but I always felt intimidated by the big IT integrators. One day – my DEC account manager told […]
Research data integrity
I usually write about best practices and practical tools to prevent data theft, data loss and data leakage – since our professional services focus on data security in Central and Eastern Europe. Data security is, I guess a sub-specialty of security and compliance. Security is chartered with ensuring the survival of a business and protecting […]
Sharing security information
I think fragmentation of knowledge is a root cause of data breaches. It’s almost a cliche to say that the security and compliance industry has done a poor job in preventing data breaches of over 245 million personal records in the past 5 years. It is apparent that government regulation is ineffective in preventing identity […]
Return on security investment
The Control Policy Group is presenting a series of 6 free online workshops starting Sep 3, 2009 at 15:00GMT. The first workshop, “Using data security metrics and a value-based approach”, will teach measurement of how well security tools reduce Value at Risk in dollars (or in Euro) and how well they will do 3 years […]
Is data loss prevention possible?
I recently saw an article on Computerweekly that asks – “Is data loss prevention possible?” I think that a more relevant question is “Is information protection possible?” The author correctly identifies that it’s easier to access data (and leak it) than to modify or delete data. However, the notion that data is out of control […]
Detecting structured data loss
Loss of large numbers of credit cards is no longer news – DLP (data loss prevention) technologies are an excellent way of obtaining real time monitoring capability without changing your network and enterprise applications systems. Typically when companies are considering a DLP (data loss prevention ) solution – they start by looking at the offerings […]
I want data loss reasons, not numbers
Media reporting of data breach events like the UK NHS, Heartland, Hannaford and Bank of America has overwhelming focussed on the raw numbers of customer data records that were breached. Little information is available regarding the root causes – how attackers exploited the system and people vulnerabilities to get the data. Although US legislation requires […]
Practical information policy
Does this look simple to you? I think it’s time to get back to security basics after reading the news this morning. Yesterday, there was a run of high profile data security events: the Mozilla store data breach, the DDOS attack on Twitter and Web defacing by a Palestinian cyber-terror group on leftist Israeli Kadima […]
