In the 1980s, Edward Amoroso was a member of the security design team for then-President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the program that sought to build a space-based shield to protect Americans from a nuclear ballistic missile attack.
Now, as chief security officer at AT&T, Amoroso oversees a strategic defense initiative of a different nature – securing billions of bytes of information as they travel over the airwaves and wires. Keep reading →
Federal technology managers foresee the use of tablet mobile computing devices by agency employees will nearly triple over the next two years, from 7% of employees in 2011 to 19% by 2013, and that smartphone use will increase from 35% to 43% of employees over the same period, as agencies look for alternatives to desktop PCs, according to a new survey. Keep reading →
At the beginning of his administration, President Obama created a minor controversy by insisting on using a personal mobile device. But much of that debate, such that it was, revolved around presidential records. Little was said, at least publicly, about the profound security implications of the commander in chief sending and receiving important, possibly vital, information through cyberspace.
Appropriately, even less was known about the type of data President Obama accesses, creates, and stores on the device, and the degree to which any such data is stored in “the cloud,” particularly in non-government-controlled cloud storage. What is known, however, is that mobile devices are the most prevalent, and most rapidly expanding, gateways to all types of cloud services. Keep reading →
Rarely does a week pass that yet another data breach appears on the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse website, and those are only the breaches that are publicly disclosed.
What’s interesting to note is that data breaches are exactly that: an egress of data. Of course, this is nothing new; for over a decade now, we’ve heard countless stories of bank accounts emptied through surreptitious keystroke loggers and successful phishing scams (who can forget such gems as, “I represent the Central Bank of Nigeria, and I have a lucrative proposal for you…”), healthcare data breached due to poor security controls, and systems brought down for extended periods via denial of service attacks from zombie hosts managed by vast-reaching command-and-control systems. Keep reading →
After five-plus years of smartphones saturating the market, it’s become clear that mobile device applications are an unqualified phenomenon, and a boon to application developers and app store vendors.
Apple recently reported that it is currently selling more than 1 billion mobile apps every month from the Apple Store; that’s an average rate of 23,148 apps per minute! The number of available apps is also increasing at an almost exponential rate. As the Apple marketing campaign goes, “there’s an app for that”, and not just on Apple’s app store: Google’s Andriod Marketplace, Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile, RIM’s Blackberry App World, Symbian’s Horizon, and many others provide instant, downloadable applications and content that range from absolutely free, to thousands of dollars. Keep reading →