A few years ago I was headed into a meeting with the president of a critical infrastructure provider when I saw and photographed a picture of a yellow Post-it note with the user name a password written on it.
As with most people reading this blog I was angered that this could happen in 2007 after all the efforts and training that had occurred to increase the level of user security awareness. Here we are some 5 years later and I am sorry to say we have not made that much progress. Keep reading →
As cyber security experts continue to look for more effective ways to deter threats, many see the battle over defending network perimeters has become a lost cause, and that new and more creative approaches are becoming essential.
What’s emerging, according to cyber system specialists in government, academia and industry, is a combination of strategies – some involving game theory, fuzzy logic, big data analytics as well as imposing the risk of costly consequences on attackers. Keep reading →
Sometime in the near future, the military may begin using tiny, dissolvable electronic devices to help wounded soldiers to fight off infection. The technology opens potentials beyond the battlefield, allowing wider use of sensors and a variety of short-term medical applications as well as providing new ways to fight infection in existing surgical implants.
Developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department’s research and development shop, these “transient” electronic devices are designed to dissolve when exposed to water and can last for weeks, days or even minutes. The electronic components are made of superthin sheets of silicon and magnesium sheathed in silk. Silk is biocompatible, which means that it can be inserted safely into the body. How long a device lasts is determined by the thickness and crystalinity of the silk. Keep reading →
Despite a longstanding deadline and months of work, most federal agencies are about to miss the Sept. 30 deadline to enable IPv6 but will face no penalties for not reaching that goal.
Officials say Sept. 30 was a goal set by the Office of Management and Budget and that consequences for not meeting it are unnecessary. Nonetheless, compliance remains important as private industry v6 compliance is strong and therefore limits government interaction. Google, for example, launched IPv6 in June (see video with Vint Cerf above). Keep reading →
What began as a simple way to help veterans view their personal health information over the Internet is continuing to snowball into an electronic health record phenomena known as the Blue Button, now used by more than a million patients nationally and gaining wider adoption by certain health care providers.
The Blue Button is a simple piece of software code that the Department of Veteran Affairs developed two years ago, that lets veterans obtain a copy of their medical information electronically.
VA and health industry officials are now exploring ways to expand its adoption, as well as the types of information patients can access.
At a recently concluded consumer health IT summit, Peter Levin, chief technology officer for the VA described how the Blue Button got started and the impact it has had since in serving veterans.
But he and Dr. Farzad Mostashari, who leads the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, also highlighted their vision to grow Blue Button’s user base from “from one million to 10 million to 100 million to the entire country.”
“We want to turn the Blue Button from a noun, to a verb,” said Levin, to a “thing that you do…when you see the Blue Button, you know…you’re going to get your health information.”
Mostashari said he expects immunization records to be accessible via Blue Button in the coming weeks.
But he and Levin said they hope to avoid having distinct types of records added individually.
“You don’t want to do this one at a time,” said Levin. “You’d like to have a methodical way, of not just (adding information) inside government, but most important of all, is doing it outside of government.”Looking ahead, Mostashari said that it is also important to ensure two things happen:
“First, making the information more usable. But not only making sure that its always human readable, for the patient and the family to have immediate access to the information, but also making it machine readable so developers can develop new tools and services.”
U.S. Treasury Department officials doled out $25,000 in cash prizes and announced the winners of the department’s MyMoneyAppUp challenge contest.
The winners were selected from among eight finalists in a final judging session taking place at the Treasury Department and available for viewing live via webcast at 9:00 A.M. EDT Friday. Keep reading →
Three years ago, the satirical news site, The Onion, published a story titled “Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles.”
One early paragraph reads:
Researchers were able to identify nearly 30 varieties of glowing rectangles that play some role throughout the course of each day. Among them: handheld rectangles, music-playing rectangles, mobile communication rectangles, personal work rectangles, and bright alarm cubes, which emit a high-pitched reminder that it’s time to rise from one’s bed and move toward the rectangles in one’s kitchen.
_____________________________________________________
This is the third in a five-part series examining the issues that governments and organizations need to address in the absence of a BYOD policy, originally published by the IBM Center for the Business of Government. For more news and insights on innovations at work in government, please sign up for the AOL Gov newsletter. For the quickest updates, like us on Facebook.
_____________________________________________________
Though the article clearly has a mocking tone, there is a clear reason for interacting as we do with those glowing rectangles: some are merely the technological membrane through which we interact with other people, while others are the entry-ways to the technological world in which we create or consume media of all kinds, from music and videos to personal and professional email and documents.
And precisely because people have access to their music, to their pictures, to their personal social networks all the time, they expect to be able to access that content and those networks all the time, even when (a) their devices cannot connect to their private network or (b) their devices alone are not able to display the media they want to consume – because their batteries are drained, for example, or because the particular device is not optimized for the type of media they need.
The Benefits of Connecting
There are numerous reasons that employees may want to connect their personal devices (BYOD) to their work computers or office networks. First, if space is an issue on their hard drives, they can play music from their MP3 players (there is debate about music’s impact on productivity). Even if the issue is not space, but rather simply installing personal applications and/or data on a work machine, connecting an external player may be seen as a good work-around.
Second, personal devices run out of power and many can recharge through USB cables. Outlet space is often limited, especially in cubicles, which now comprise 70% of office spaces according to one report. In those circumstances, it seems logical to charge devices in series rather than in parallel.
Finally, and perhaps most persuasively, work is rarely confined to a single machine and the small devices people take with them everywhere are the perfect, and sometimes preferred media for storing documents that will be edited on multiple machines. And why not? Windows phones, iPhones, and Android phones all carry gigabytes of space that are available for those large PowerPoint presentations and image files that no one wants to send through email.
The Dangers of Connecting and How to Minimize Them
There are three main perils of connecting personal devices to work computers and networks. The primary concerns, of course, are malware and spyware. These twin dangers become more apparent whenever new viruses are discovered on Android phones, or the full implications of iPhone apps are realized.
Of secondary, but not insignificant, concern is that employees could use their personal devices to skirt the spirit of the official use-policy, if not its letter. For example, sites that place a toll on an organization’s bandwidth-Pandora, for example, or YouTube-may be blocked on workstations, but employees could run similar apps from their phones-Spotify and/or Amazon Prime Videos.
> Finally, there is simply the productivity issue. Do the media and applications that personal devices bring into the workplace ultimately boost, depress, or have no impact on productivity?
As with accessing work data, there are three ways that organizations can regulate connecting personal devices to work assets.
First, organizations can ban the practice entirely. Second, they can use technological filters, for example by requiring any device to have security enable before it can connect to a network or computer. Third, organizations can have only policy filters in place.
The most important point, however, is that the leadership addresses this issue in their mobile device use-policy and that all employees understand the risks in connecting their devices to work computers and networks.
Gadi Ben-Yehuda (Twitter: @GBYehuda) is Director for Innovation and Social Media at the IBM Center for the Business of Government.
Keep reading →
Commercial industry needs to step up and share more information about cyber attacks on its networks with Federal agencies responsible for cyber defense government officials said at a cybersecurity event in Washington this week.
Cyber attacks are showing increasing sophistication across the board – from basement hackers to foreign intelligence agencies, said Sean Kanuck, national intelligence officer for the National Intelligence Council during a daylong INSA Cyber Innovation Symposium Sept. 26. Keep reading →
The U.S. Army is expected to open a new mobile applications store as part of a pilot program designed to offer a more flexible way to develop and buy software for the government. The online store will provide a space where users can request specific tools and where participating developers can quickly provide or create a product to fill respective needs without getting bogged down in a complex and time consuming acquisitions process.
The new pilot will be a six-month effort that will support the Army’s intelligence service and the potentially intelligence agencies. Keep reading →
The United States is “losing the cyber espionage war” against China, Russia and other countries, but even in the face of such a grave threat the country cannot agree on how to protect its precious intellectual seed capital from these predations, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says.
“We are running out of time on this,” Rep. Mike Rogers, respected for working closely with his ranking member, said in a speech at today’s Intelligence and National Security Alliance‘s (INSA) cyber conference here. Keep reading →