Expert Advice

EXPERT ADVICE

An InfoSec Holiday Survival Guide

It's December again, and it's a challenging time for information security organizations. It's challenging because while attacks become more prevalent during the holiday season in the form of spam and targeted malware, organizational security "readiness" paradoxically wanes at exactly the same time....

Access to data has never been easier than it is today. With a few easy steps, it's possible to uncover just about any type of information you can imagine, even data that is supposedly legally protected, such as personal, financial, healthcare and government records. However, individuals with nefario...

EXPERT ADVICE

BYOD and IT: The Tail Wagging the Dog?

There was perhaps no hotter topic in 2011 than the consumerization of IT, and for good reason. The rise of personal technology -- smartphones, tablets, storage devices and cloud services -- has forced the hand of IT departments across every industry sector, from SMB to enterprise. While the impact o...

EXPERT ADVICE

Tablets in the Enterprise: Still a Blank Slate

It's about time to change the stereotypical tablet user from casual and hipster to high-management. The post-PC world is now; tablets and other mobile devices are beginning to dominate the marketplace. An estimated 45 million tablets will be sold in 2011, three times the number sold in 2010, accord...

Everybody knows that the cloud -- in particular, the security of cloud deployments -- is a huge pain point industry-wide. And as is the case with any new endeavor with such broad-sweeping impact, there's no shortage of well-meaning advice about how to secure it. But I confess to finding much of t...

EXPERT ADVICE

Data Integration in the Cloud – or Not

Data integration is critical for companies that need to combine systems and databases after a merger or acquisition, or need to link legacy systems to new business applications. This need is vast throughout commercial and public industries, and the task can be daunting, especially for CIOs and IT ma...

EXPERT ADVICE

What HTML5 Hath Wrought

"Build once, run everywhere" has been the goal of many platforms, although most recently the motto was used for Java. It has rarely been completely true. In Java's case, "build once, test everywhere" was closer to the mark. A true universal platform offers many financial benefits: It removes uncerta...

EXPERT ADVICE

Avoiding All-Too-Common App Development Pitfalls

Software development drives business innovation, but many application development teams are stymied by some common, solvable challenges that can sidetrack the success not only of their project, but also of their company. The top three: achieving effective alignment with business concerns; managing t...

EXPERT ADVICE

Next-Gen Firewalls Make Old Arguments New Again

The last few years have brought us arguably the most significant change in firewall technology in decades. Ever since "stateful inspection" was introduced by Check Point in the late 1990s, firewall administrators and information security officers have been defining security policies based primarily ...

The definition of "cybercrime" is ever changing, as is the severity of attacks. 2011 has already been labeled the "year of the data breach," and yet many of the breaches are not the typical SQL injection attacks or database hacks. Instead, criminals are using legitimate website functions to steal da...

EXPERT ADVICE

Is InfoSec Ready for Big Data?

Over the past few decades, most IT shops have followed a somewhat similar trajectory: Starting from a centralized model, computing resources, much like the cosmological Big Bang, have exploded outwards to become ever-more-distributed and decentralized. This makes sense given market dynamics. Comput...

EXPERT ADVICE

Social Menaces

In terms of online communication, social media is the biggest trend in recent years. There are billions of participants around the globe as well as an array of forms: blogs, forums, wikis, multimedia content, social bookmarking and, of course, popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+....

EXPERT ADVICE

The Social Game Changers

Once considered the red-headed stepchild of the gaming industry, social gaming is finally taking its rightful place at the table. The free-to-play model has surged to the forefront of next-generation gaming, while console game companies and traditional game developers have faltered by the wayside.

The recent spearphishing attacks on security firm RSA and on the International Monetary Fund are both suspected of being attacks by foreign powers to steal data that could be used in a cyberoffensive against the United States. In fact, the CIA website and the U.S. Senate were also breached by the ha...

Let's face it: Social engineering -- attacking an organization through deception by "tricking" internal users into sharing inappropriate levels of access -- isn't a topic that comes up very much in most IT shops. This isn't because social engineering is ineffective or because organizations aren't s...

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