Privacy & data protection

ERM: The forgotten data security space

With information technology, you can look at problems and solutions in lots of different ways. For end users and academics, this can lead to a lot of experimentation, skunk works projects, and trial-and-error. But that is not the case when it comes to technology vendors. Start-ups also see lots of ways to solve problems, but they are bound by business plans, directors, and funding to pick their battles and build focused solutions. Some make the right choice and get lucky, some don't.

As an example, I offer two different solution types for data security: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and … Read more

Norton 2009 products open to public beta

On Monday, Symantec opened two of its Norton 2009 products to public beta. Both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2009 feature new code that not only makes the scans and services run faster, but consume fewer system resources, says Tom Powledge, vice president of consumer product management.

As an example, Powledge said that where Norton Internet Security 2006 consumed roughly 300MB of hard-disk space, the 2009 version is coming in around 100MB. Symantec has achieved this, in part, by reducing a number of redundancies introduced over the years. For example, previous versions of NIS contained multiple copies of … Read more

Facing the pain of passwords

Passwords are like the common cold: they induce headaches, no one is immune, and there is no cure in sight.

But they are necessary in this era of digital data, where everything from paying bills to passing notes to sharing photos is done online through user accounts that require some proof that you really are who you say you are. The need for passwords to be both easy to remember and difficult to guess poses what we all know as the password problem.

"This is a horrible problem," said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of BT Counterpane, who … Read more

Photobucket plugs hole that revealed private photos

Photobucket on Monday fixed a security hole that allowed people to view private photos of strangers.

All that was needed was the user ID of someone with a private album on Photobucket and the file name of one photo in their album, said Byron Ng, a Vancouver, B.C.-based computer technician who exposes security flaws in social networks and other sites.

Many MySpace users use Photobucket to post material on their MySpace pages, he said in an e-mail, adding, "This is a way to find 'some' private Photobucket albums."

MySpace and Photobucket are both owned by News … Read more

Hitachi announcement adds momentum to hard drive encryption

Last week, Hitachi announced its 7K1000, a 3.5-inch terabyte drive for PCs that also offers full-disk encryption (FDE). This drive joins a growing number of encrypting drives from Hitachi as well as Fujitsu and Seagate. Certainly, Samsung and Western Digital can't be far behind.

In my view, Hitachi's announcement is across the industry for several reasons:

1. New corporate laptop purchases will likely contain encrypting drives. Now that laptop vendors like Acer, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard have multiple disk drive suppliers to choose from, they are far more likely to build and sell more laptops with encrypting drives. … Read more