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If a little compliance creates a false sense of security then a lot of compliance regulation creates an atmosphere of feeling secure, while in fact most businesses and Web services are in fact very insecure. Is a free market democracy doomed to suffer from privacy breaches – by definition? My father is a retired PhD …

Are technical privacy controls a substitute for responsible human behavior? In the business environment,  management leadership from the front on data security and privacy is a more effective (as in cheaper and stronger) countermeasure than technology when it comes to mitigating trusted insider threats. In the family environment, we traditionally see parents as responsible for …

Trends –  security and movie stars, Manuela Arcuri and  Monica Bellucci, Verisign and Mcafee. Information security and  risk analysis is complex stuff, with multiple dimensions  of people, software, performance, management, technology, assets, threats, vulnerabilities and control relationships.  This is why it’s hard to sell security to organizations. But, information security is also a lot like fashion with cyclical …

Data without interoperability =  pain. What is happening in the US healthcare space is fascinating as stimulus funds (or what they call in the Middle East – “baksheesh”) are being paid to doctors to acquire an Electronic Health Records system that has “meaningful use”. The term “meaningful use” is vaguely  defined in the stimulus bill …

This is a presentation I gave at the UPU (Universal Postal Union) EPSG (Electronic Products and Services working Group) working meeting in Bern on Feb 20, 2007. About 25 people from 20 countries were present and it was a great experience for me to hear how Postal operations see themselves and what they do in …

Obama’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace In April President Obama signed the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) which charts a course for the public and private sectors to collaborate on raising the level of trust associated with identity in online transactions. NSTIC focuses on upgrading outdated password-based authentication systems and …

A recent HIPAA violation in Canada  where an imaging technician accessed the medical records of her ex-husband’s girlfriend comes as no surprise to me. Data leakage of ePHI in hospitals is rampant simply because a) there is a lot of it floating around and b) because of human nature.  Humans being naturally curious, sometimes vindictive and always …

This evening I was added to a FB Group – apparently – you don’t have to agree to be joined in. FB Groups is a way to organize your contacts and get better control over your social networking.  It looks pretty cool to me but the New York Times suggests that Facebook groups may engender even more …

I saw a post recently on Controlled social networking for student collaboration. One of the comments lamented not having the head count to install technology to control Facebook access by students. Frankly – as a data security and compliance consultant who does a lot of work with corporates in social networking (both on the application side …

There is a school of thought that says that you can take any complex problem and break it down like swiss cheese. Risk assessment data collection and analysis with Excel is one of those problems that can’t be swiss-cheesed.  A collection of brittle, unwieldy, two dimensional worksheets is a really bad way of doing multi-dimensional …