It was a bad day for the Internet. At some time that morning, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) shut down, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) web site broke and the United Airlines halted all U.S. departures for about two hours due to a router failure. All of these events are, most probably, not related, but it does…
DetailsThe original series was written in a frenzy. Aggregating is the inverse of broadcasting. Aggregation is biased towards anonymity. Being the subject of a data point is a matter of immediate experience. Cohorts choose people more than people choose cohorts. And so on. Frenzies have a welcome feature: the simultaneity of both focus and chaos. …
DetailsI don’t know how many of the readers out there have gotten to deal with the joy of document preservation, but let me tell you, it is not a lot of fun. The process at Columbia starts off with either the General Counsel’s (GC) office receiving a notice from a lawyer or the University deciding…
DetailsAs a CISO, I am often asked, “What is the key component to the success of an Information Security organization?” Too often, we dwell on the failures or gaps, and it is important to recognize where these faults lie in order to enhance the program’s capabilities. But when things are “working,” it is easy to become…
DetailsThe story about the Office of Personnel Management getting hacked this week was, unfortunately, not a big surprise to anyone in the security world. How it got hacked, by phishing, was something that anyone who has been in the security field for any length of time could have predicted. What comes as a surprise to…
DetailsDo you know how Merriam-Webster defines vacation? Believe it or not – this is what it says: – A period of time that a person spends away from home, school, or business usually in order to relax or travel – The number of days or hours per year for which an employer agrees to pay workers…
DetailsIn my last article, I talked about using the 20 Critical Controls as a practical security strategy. I showed how the controls map to a wide variety of international and national standards. I also mentioned a great www site, www.auditscripts.com, where you can download 3 excellent spreadsheets to help you measure your progress in the…
DetailsI frequently talk to myself. I think that this is mostly OK, except when I have an argument. The other day, I asked myself, “Who am I?” and I was surprised with the answer. It turns out that this is not a simple question, especially if the one asking is a computer (of course, they…
DetailsWhy did the chicken cross the road? To add 200 more steps to his daily wearable device count! But did the chicken ever stop to think about the impact to his life if that data were to be breached? I have my doubts. In today’s world with the increasing number of devices that we use and…
DetailsThe recent Sony breach attributed to North Korea is only the latest in a series of Sony hacks that trace back to 2005. Most news stories point to the recent breach as an example of why corporations should take information security more seriously. Sony is being used as a cautionary tale of what awaits companies…
DetailsIt’s now commonplace to read that security means more than checking off boxes on a compliance checklist. A robust approach to security includes trying to fill the gaps between the boxes. I would argue that that argument has mostly been won. In No Book to Be By, I argued that we should extend that argument…
DetailsI’ve been around the computer business for a long time. Way back, before the Web and even before computers, if you wanted to send a secret message to someone, you used a simple substitution code. An example of this was the Caesar cipher. This was a simple rotation or shift of the alphabet. Plain: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ…
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