Responding to the <a href="http://www.bcbst.com/about/news/releases/default.asp?release=292">theft of 57 hard drives in 2009</a> , BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee has completed a $6 million project to encrypt all of its at-rest data.
Lucas Mearian | 22 Aug | Read more
Two weeks ago <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2011/080811-backspin.html">I contended</a> that "Freedom and privacy, in any meaningful sense, are dead" and discussed the two types of privacy, "factual" privacy, which concerns "static" data such as your age and cholesterol level, and "lifestream" privacy which is the realtime data about things such as where you go and who you talk to.
Mark Gibbs | 22 Aug | Read more
A nifty Google browser extension called "Google Related" makes finding associated Web content a snap, but for privacy-minded Web surfers the convenience will come with a hefty cost. The Chrome Web browser extension creates a navigation bar at the bottom of the browser, and as you roll your mouse cursor over the bar Google generates content relevant to what's on the page you're viewing.
John P. Mello Jr. | 18 Aug | Read more
Despite Google’s efforts to bolster internal privacy initiatives after its Street View fiasco, there was still room for improvement, according to the UK’s Information Commissioner.
Organisations invest a lot of time, money and effort in collecting, storing and mining data to derive positive outcomes for their business.
Murray Goldsmith | 13 Aug | Read more
The hacking collective Anonymous released personal data on Sunday belonging to more than 2,000 public transport customers in the San Francisco area in retaliation for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system's shutdown of mobile phone service on Thursday night.
Jeremy Kirk | 15 Aug | Read more
Recent publicity for online hacking groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec has seemed to show that nobody is immune from attack on the Internet. Once targeted, it seems that these groups are capable of breaching security systems and retrieving data, including identity information, from the most secure systems.
Robert Layton | 13 Aug | Read more
A lot of the software written for Google's Android mobile phones falls short when it comes to user privacy and security.
Robert McMillan | 13 Aug | Read more
This week's storm over LinkedIn's opt-out foolishness is a valuable reminder that businesses need to maintain a close watch on social networking services (SNS) and be prepared to respond swiftly to any changes.
Stilgherrian | 12 Aug | Read more
LinkedIn might have broken European law by changing privacy settings for its members without proper disclosure, legal experts assert.
René Schoemaker | 11 Aug | Read more
For his work on the foundations of a new way of encrypting data, Brent Waters from the University of Texas in Austin has been elected as one of this year's Microsoft Research Faculty Fellows.
Nicolas Zeitler | 11 Aug | Read more
Some popular apps store sensitive data such as user names and passwords and credit card information in plain text on your phone's memory, making the data an easy target for hackers. A Chicago-based mobile forensics company called viaForensics recently found as much after completing an audit of dozens of the most popular apps on both iOS and Android platforms.
Megan Geuss | 10 Aug | Read more
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has found a school in Hampshire in breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA) after the personal details of nearly 20,000 people were put at risk when the school's website was hacked.
Anh Nguyen | 09 Aug | Read more
EMC has squirrelled away US$81.3 million in reserve to cover the cost of customer remediation in response to the attack on RSA’s SecurID system it revealed in March.
Freedom and privacy, in any meaningful sense, are dead. I know, I know ... I've written about this topic before but that was in the context of our "factual" privacy, which is about access to what you might think of as "static" data about you. Now we have to recognize the death of our "realtime" or "lifestream" privacy: the freedom to go about our business unobserved and anonymously.
Mark Gibbs | 08 Aug | Read more
To prevent online privacy breaches Australia needs a privacy watchdog rather than merely guidelines, a law lecturer has argued.
Lisa Banks | 08 Aug | Read more
Wikileaks, hacking incidents like those attributed to LulzSec, and even the UK's News of the World voicemail scandal represent a fourth stage in the evolution of cybercrime, according to Dr Paul Nielsen, director and chief executive officer of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburg.
Stilgherrian | 08 Aug | Read more
The Information Commisioner's Office (ICO) has found two London housing bodies in breach of the Data Protection Act after a contractor left the personal data of thousands of tenants on an unencrypted memory stick in a pub.
Anh Nguyen | 05 Aug | Read more
As a CSO and CIO you may be wondering why I crafted a diagnostic related to understanding your most critical web products. The original purpose of the diagnostic was to discern which applications and how applications are ported successfully to a service provider's cloud. The diagnostic determines which cloud IaaS products (storage components, network components, and virtualization machines) are needed for an application. It addresses the platform components (server/operating system and web server) in the PaaS layer. Lastly, it focuses on the SaaS software application.
Gregory Machler | 05 Aug | Read more
In its latest annual <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/security.html">security</a> <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26931">report</a>, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/microsoft/">Microsoft</a> claimed some progress in fending off vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution.
Jon Brodkin | 03 Aug | Read more