I had the privilege last week of attending a joint meeting of the Internet Security Alliance, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Software Alliance, and TechAmerica. The guest of honor was Melissa Hathaway who was appointed Acting Senior Director of Cybersecurity by President Obama last month. Her brief is to conduct a 60 day review to, as the press release put it;

“… develop a strategic framework to ensure that U.S. Government cyber security initiatives are appropriately integrated, resourced and coordinated with Congress and the private sector.”

Most recently Ms. Hathaway served in the Bush administration under National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell.

Speaking in an open forum is a...

John Dasher - Director of Product Marketing

One of the more common queries I hear when talking with both customers and the press involves how I manage my computer/data security while traveling. People seem increasingly nervous about this.

There are a variety of best practices that are specific to your operating system platform (which I’ll cover in a future post), there are a number of import safeguards you can take regardless of your specific computing environment. While I personally find this specific solution a bit of a pain in actual practice, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the safest approach you can take is to simply not travel with sensitive data. You can’t lose or have stolen what you haven’t brought with you. And...

Brian Tokuyoshi - Product Marketing Manager

I had a recent conversation with a friend who just opened a new checking account at a major national bank. My friend was complaining about the difficulty remembering her PIN (personal identification number) for her ATM card because of the policies for the number.

It’s usually passwords that people complain about when it comes to difficult policies.  Typical policies usually require that passwords cannot be shorter than 6 characters, and must have a mix of upper/lower case, numbers, or symbols. Often, such policies make the password computationally safe from a dictionary attack, but users find the resulting password so difficult to memorize that they need a written reminder in order to recall it at a later date.

So I found it interesting that this is a scenario where the PIN was difficult to use.  PIN numbers for ATMs are typically numeric only, so there isn’t the same complexity...

Brian Tokuyoshi - Product Marketing Manager

As the Academy Awards wrap up, I’m reminded of the film Amadeus, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1985. The eponymous film is a dramatization about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In a famous scene, Emperor Joseph II, offering his opinion on Mozart’s new symphony, comments that,  “There are simply too many notes”, without providing any deeper insight into which particular sequence trouble him.

Enterprises today are facing a related situation, except the issue should be called “too many encryption keys” as well as its closely related issue called “too many encryption products”. Let’s take a common example. Growing concerns about data breach notification laws lead ACME company to deploy a disk encryption product. Over time new requirements emerge, and ACME realizes that they need to...