It’s My Way or “La Puerta”
The role of a supervisor in protecting company data. There is a feeling of entitlement in the Western world that enables employees to use company resources for private purposes. If can use a pencil, you can use a phone, if you can use a phone, you can use your PC to surf the Net on […]
Data protection for an SME
As Ben Franklin said – “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Three misconceptions regarding data protection and data loss prevention are prevalent in small to medium sized organisations – whether in manufacturing, distribution or education or in a service business. In my professional security practice over the past 5 years providing […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ethics and data loss prevention
Are we loving the attackers and prosecuting the victims? In data security – I don’t subscribe to utilitarian ethics (which attempts to balance the benefit versus the damage of an act) and can lead to the ends justifying the means. For data security and compliance – I personally implement the “Ten commandments” approach – if […]
Scientific New York Post
I recently saw a great piece of pseudo-science courtesy of Websense describing the cost of data loss and amazing ROI for the Websense Data Security solution. (a friend who studied physics with me used to call this sort of writing “Scientific New York Post”) See Websense white paper ROI of DLP Bruce Schneier correctly notes […]
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 […]
Open Access publishing
The GM of a prospect recently asked me how to control disclosure of internal research documents prior to publication. It had come as a revelation to him that anyone can post on a blog without permission from a central secretariat. I asked him how they control face-to-face information exchange with colleagues or competitors outside the […]
