Albert Gonzalez, the mastermind behind the TJX, Heartland and Hannaford Bros. breaches, recently admitted that he was also the perpetrator behind the 2007 breach of Target Stores. While it was a small breach in comparison to his other accomplishments, prosecutors deemed it worthy of adding another two years to the minimum sentence they are requesting.

The Reuters report on the case indicates Gonzalez will now serve 17 to 25 years for his crimes. What I found more interesting than the developments in Gonzalez' case was the mention that one of his co-conspirators, Steven Watt, who was convicted of developing the software Gonzalez used, has been sentenced to two years in prison for his contributions to Gonzalez crime spree. He also gets to spend an extra three years having all of his computer and Internet activities "monitored."

The reason I think this is significant is that...

These days you don’t need to wait for holiday sales to buy the tiniest, highest capacity USB thumb drive you can find. A 2GB USB drive sells for under $10 in the US, and works great to put family pictures, your favorite music (yes, the 80s were a good era) and oh yeah, the customer files you need to share with Bob at the audit firm. There’s only one problem: these drives tend to get lost easily, or as what often happens with most people, you just can’t remember where you put it. If that happens, you have now put out confidential company data (and possibly personal data) free for all to see, out into the world. This can very quickly turn into an organizational nightmare when it turns out that the drive was indeed lost, and now your organization has to inform investors, its customers, and just about everybody else about this loss. A look at the...

Doug McLean - Blogmeister

So why does an information security company care whether you use Facebook or Outlook to communicate? The answer is that PGP Corporation is committed to protecting our customers’ data regardless of where it is and what device it is on. Giving up email or migrating to a hybrid email/social networking platform does not absolve individuals and enterprises from protecting the confidential information contained in their messages, status updates and tweets.

In fact, it complicates the situation in that there is clearly a class of information you will never want resident on any platform over which you don’t have complete control. This need for secure communications, particularly in the case of the social networking platforms (SNP), will lead to private Twitter groups (Flocks?), identity verified Facebook groups, and user encrypted message archives.  NOW this gets interesting.

There has been...

Doug McLean - Blogmeister

I audited a class at the local college recently. In the final 5 minutes of the final class, the instructor asserted that, “…social media will kill email.” As one of the very early adopters of email and responsible for bringing a number of email technologies to market, I dismissed his claim as the ranting of a tired lecturer who allowed his mouth to get a beat or two ahead of his brain. In retrospect, however, I’ve concluded he may have had a point.

I have to admit I didn’t see his point until I read a headline recently indicating that 92% of global email traffic is now spam. The fact that most email is junk isn’t news as the percent of measured spam has been hovering around 90% for quite some time. The fact that spam has dominated the email landscape for so long is helping to drive some interesting user behaviors, however.  We’re starting to see...