Security: Opinions

Is the NSA defending their intellectual property with more success than they protect our country?

A top secret NSA program to collect ALL Verizon customers' call data isn't at all surprising

The network team is on board with plan to update the devices to current versions, but who will do the work?

Sure, the headline gives away the answer, but if you had been asked to guess which state has the highest rate of reported identity theft you'd likely have chosen Florida: A large population of vulnerable retirees and a generally high crime rate all but guarantee the distinction.

In early May President Obama signed an executive order that makes "Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information".

For decades the leading network companies have been tightly coupling their software to complex, custom-built chips. Besides leaving IT buyers with a staggering array of appliances, the reliance on custom silicon has chilled industry startup activity. But with software defined networking, that is beginning to change.

Get this: The CIA sees the Cloud as being more secure than conventional IT.

Considering the enormous webcam market and the number of products available it's hard to believe that anyone could come up with anything new, novel and useful but, impressively, that's just what Logitech has managed to do with its Broadcaster Wi-Fi Webcam, a really well-designed webcam for OS X and iOS only.

I've spent the past few days at the annual show for the National Association of Broadcasters, also known as NAB. The trade show, held in Las Vegas, features events and products geared toward television and radio stations, as well as filmmakers and other video creators.

Windows service accounts used by software are often given domain administrator rights, just because it's quick and easy. That sort of thing rubs security managers the wrong way.

The recent RSA conference in San Francisco was awash in talk of big data, but it was clear there was some disagreement about what people mean by big data and some outright skepticism about it being the answer.

From the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department: Security experts trying to tell a Pennsylvania hospital that a pile of its sensitive data belonging to staff -- and possibly patients -- was sitting exposed on the Internet were stymied for five days recently by the fact that no one at the medical facility would respond to their repeated warnings.

Data is more important to businesses today than it has ever been, doing everything from revealing trends in customer behavior to comparing sales performance across business units and regions. Comprehensive data collection provides the who, what, when and how associated with almost all organizational activity. This information is incredibly valuable to executives because it plays a critical role in strategic business decisions. As such, all businesses - big and small - must have a data backup strategy in place to protect against data loss.

Episode 1: Last week the administrators of 7,000 university websites were being called upon to change their .edu domain account passwords after a server security breach. Trouble was that the breach had been reported to the admins by Educause -- the non-profit higher-education IT group that runs .edu -- via an email that some recipients complained bore the familiar markings of a phishing attempt.

Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) retired in January after quite a colorful two-dozen years in the U.S. Senate. One of the major issues he pushed for during his last few years in office was protection of the U.S. critical infrastructure. Along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lieberman put forth a series of bills aimed at requiring some level of protection for such infrastructure, the last of these being voted down in November.

The Federal Government has slapped security on the frontline of IT agendas with its announcement of a new cyber security centre in Canberra and an additional $1.46 billion in funding for cyber security as part of a new national security blueprint.

Too often, New Year's resolutions to get into better shape are derailed because of a lack of realistic planning. The same thing happens in the security sphere.

Gibbs reviews his predictions from last year and surveys the more than 400 predictions that he's been sent by IT professionals

A report surfaced recently contending that BlackBerry OS 10 will include a list of 106 prohibited passwords designed to prevent the clueless from choosing the likes of 123456, blackberry, or the ever-popular "password" as their password.

Well folks, Christmas is once more upon us and I just received a present ... from myself.