There's big trouble in the world of information security, and yet it seems that only a handful of us techies have noticed. What's the problem, you ask? Well, there are actually several problems, but they're all related to one very important issue: public trust. Let's take a look.
There was a disturbance in the force this past week. Did you notice? Apple publicly made a positive security move. Seriously. (Stop laughing!)
It's a new dawn, people! As of today, you can walk into just about any Starbucks store and pay for your latte using nothing other than a (free) iPhone app, coupled to an existing Starbucks card account. That's right -- the day of mobile electronic payments is here at last! Ta-dah!
We don't take the Internet seriously. If we did, we'd be treating it a lot differently than we do. But, as witnessed by our own actions, the Net clearly isn't a serious thing -- at least it's not an infrastructure to us. Maybe one day it will be, but that day hasn't come yet.
Cloud computing is all the rage these days. CIOs seem to be diving into cloud-based solutions with reckless abandon despite the fact that a mistake in planning or execution can have career-limiting effects. So, let's take a moment to balance the benefits against the potential security pitfalls that lie in the clouds.
While the rest of the world focuses on the perceived issues surrounding the iPhone 4's antenna reception, I thought I'd bring us back to something that really matters to iPhone users, namely, the security of Apple's App Store, which just marked its two-year birthday.
I know that chances are no one rushed to remove all SQL injection vulnerabilities from their Web applications after I warned in my column last month how serious they can be.
