Security: Back to basics (Part 1 – The Human Touch)

Taking a look at the latest quarterly update on security from Symantec, there are still some basic steps that system administrators can do to protect their network and endpoints. These are the low-hanging fruit that can help prevent attacks and comprise of confidential data. Education is still one of the top three returns on investment on the security side. An educated end-user will not click on links in emails that aren’t from trusted parties, open password-protected zip files and run their contents, and question suspicious emails with the help desk. An educated management team understands that Security is not just a line item that can be eliminated or reduced. As treats become more sophisticated at penetrating networks and endpoints, increasingly more sophisticated tools are needed to prevent, find, and remove these threats.

San Francisco Lockout – Found Guilty: the city or the admin?

After years of public acrimony and a 6 month trial, San Francisco IT administrator Terry Childs has been found guilty of hijacking the city’s computer system.  Cyber-Ark has always maintained that this was more than simply a case about a rogue employee, but in fact an example of an organizational failure in managing and effectively taking ownership of privileged accounts and identities.  At the end of the

The Darwinian Challenge of Cybersecurity

The adaptive nature of threats to information security has proven to be one of the greatest challenges to personal, business, and government adoption of computing in general, and communication of digital information over the public Internet, in particular. Today we are not only concerned with theft of private or sensitive information created and stored on ubiquitous personal computing and communications devices, we also have to be concerned with the security of our information while it is in transit and when it is in storage at its destination.