Brian Tokuyoshi - Product Marketing Manager

The PCI Data Security Standard brought the issue of data encryption to light for many organizations. It established a baseline for security practices that highlighted some of the things that best-of-class security organizations already knew, such as specifying the types of data that must be protected and how to avoid risky practices that could expose such information to unauthorized access. It was necessary because the card processing industry is extensive and there needed to be guidelines to bring all the participating companies up to spec.

Yet it still appears to be clear that there are lingering misunderstandings about what it sought to achieve. From the viewpoint of the industry, it is easier to understand its purpose, for it gives the credit card industry better assurances to its customers that all the companies handling personal information have met a minimum set of security standards. From the...

Phil Dunkelberger - President & CEO

With news of data breaches becoming a regular event and increasing in frequency, they hardly count as "news" any longer. In fact, breach disclosures have become such a regular part of our daily routine that it's getting harder to see the "forest for the trees." As nearly all states now have breach disclosure laws, we're now living in an era where fewer breaches go unreported, even if some of them get reported late. The question now is not whether data is at risk, but what new threats are emerging and how do we best address them. I'm pleased to announce that PGP Corporation has partnered with the Open Security Foundation...

Doug McLean - Blogmeister

Readers of this blog know that I've been following the case against Albert Gonzalez, the alleged mastermind behind the TJX breach. Last Monday came the shocking news that the Justice Department has concluded that Gonzalez also led the teams that breached both Heartland Payment Systems and Hannaford Bros. Supermarkets. Think about that for a minute, we've now traced three of the largest data breaches in history to the "vision" and leadership of a single man. Gonzalez is currently incarcerated in Brooklyn, NY where he's awaiting trial for allegedly perpetrating the comparatively modest breach of Dave & Busters Restaurants.

We've also learned that Gonzalez and his colleagues did not attack companies at random, but selected specific Fortune 500...

Doug McLean - Blogmeister

The Washington Post broke an interesting story just before the Independence Day holiday about the issues the National Security Agency (NSA) has encountered in deploying their latest cyberdefense system. The Post requires a log-in to view the story, but the Wall Street Journal also covered the topic in more depth and it’s open to all to read, which I strongly recommend to anyone that cares about cybersecurity.

The basic story runs as follows. The Bush administration chartered the NSA with developing a comprehensive solution to both detect and block cyberattacks aimed at federal networks. The system, named Einstein, was originally deployed in 2002, though the functionality of the system was limited to intrusion detection, no countermeasure...