IT Security
Even as the government cracks down on illegal hackers, enhances its own network security and encourages the public and private sectors to beef up their own computer security, threats from a malicious virus, spam, worms and other malware continue to challenge an organization's firewall and its other IT security protections.
Capitol Hill: Heritage Foundation to Congress: Reform DHS funding process
January 18th, 2008
The Heritage Foundation is urging Congress to streamline its DHS budget-making process, by moving towards adoption of a single DHS appropriation bill. "Broad homeland security policy issues would be better addressed in an authorization bill than by a patchwork of legislation," the conservative think tank advised in a recent white paper. It added that a single authorization bill "would allow the authorizing committees to exercise more stringent oversight of the Department of Homeland Security." The report, authored by Senior Policy Analyst Mackenzie Eaglen, suggested that the streamlined process would also allow Congress to address the many homeland security issues that individual pieces of legislation have not covered, while reducing "reactive stand-alone legislation that is inevitably proposed after the latest threat or incident and directed at ever-changing security concerns."
Hashing has its day in court
January 11th, 2008
Last Wednesday, I attended a mock trial in New York City that was designed to illustrate how difficult -- or easy -- it would be for a corporate chieftain to fraudulently back-date a stock-option grant document in order to enrich himself upon the exercise of those stock options.
L-1 to acquire Bioscrypt in $44 million stock swap
January 7th, 2008
L-1 Identity Solutions, Inc., one of the leading companies in the biometrics sector, has continued its buying spree with the announcement that it plans to acquire Bioscrypt Inc., based in Ontario, Canada, a provider of access control systems, in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at approximately $44 million.
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Detroit grand jury indicts 11 for spamming with a botnet attack
January 4th, 2008
A federal grand jury in Detroit today unsealed a 41-count indictment against 11 people for allegedly running a large international spamming operation that relied, in part, on a botnet attack that took control of unsuspecting computers and drafted them into the illegal spamming effort.
Idaho National Lab offers cyber software for licensing
December 14th, 2007
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory has developed software that would enable the operator of a critical infrastructure plant to assess the cyber vulnerability of the plant’s industrial control systems. It would now like help in bringing its software to the commercial marketplace.
Department of State tightens its HSPD-12 contracts
November 20th, 2007
The U.S. State Department seems to be getting more serious about HSPD-12 and the way it requires outside contractors who perform work at federal offices and facilities to identify themselves.
Global debut for "Twenty-Five Triple Nine"
November 5th, 2007
For years, executives in charge of their company’s disaster preparedness -- known to the trendier folks among us as "business continuity planning" -- have had no specific guidelines on what, precisely, they were expected to do to get ready for the next crisis.
Security in software needs careful scrutiny
October 25th, 2007
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued executive order 10450, empowering the U.S. Government to strengthen national security through checks that employees of our government were "reliable, trustworthy, of good conduct and character, and of complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States…" Those background checks illustrated the government’s recognition of a few basic facts: you can’t trust everyone, and even somebody that you can trust today may have underlying weaknesses that can turn him or her tomorrow.
