prevention

The Pentagon spent more than $100 million in the past six months cleaning up after Internet attacks and network issues, military leaders said on Tuesday.

"The important thing is that we recognize that we are under assault from the least sophisticated--what I would say the bored teenager--all the way up to the sophisticated nation-state, with some petty criminal elements sandwiched in between," Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, told reporters at a cyberspace conference in Omaha, Neb., as reported by CBS News.

Neither he nor Army Brigadier Gen. John Davis, deputy commander for … Read more

As layoffs continue apace, a survey released on Monday shows what many companies fear--exiting workers are taking a lot more with them than just their personal plants and paperweights.

Of about 950 people who said they had lost or left their jobs during the last 12 months, nearly 60 percent admitted to taking confidential company information with them, including customer contact lists and other data that could potentially end up in the hands of a competitor for the employee's next job stint.

"I don't think these people see themselves as being thieves or as stealing," said … Read more

As its name suggests, Prevent Restore keeps others from restoring deleted files by filling in unused sectors on your hard drive. It worked as promised, but it took a long time to do its job.

Each time we tried to access the program through the desktop icon, we received an error message. We were able to bypass it and move on to the user interface, but it was a mark against the program. Prevent Restore comes with a wizard that makes it especially easy to get started. First, it asked us to select which disk we wanted to run the … Read more

Did your brother-in-law really send you a singing holiday card? Did a long-lost friend from college really include you on this year's list?

One inexpensive way to send holiday cheer may be to send e-cards, but security vendor AVG warned on Tuesday that online criminals are taking advantage of the fact most people don't know the difference between a legitimate e-card and one hosting malware.

Last week security vendors warned of a Trojan horse masquerading as holiday-themed e-cards from McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Hallmark.

To better educate the public, AVG has launched a site, "Slam the Holiday Scam,", … Read more

Google has always deserved a little healthy suspicion. Now it may be getting unhealthy.

The company that will never, never share your search information, unless, well, things change, is launching something called Flu Trends.

It is based on the exciting notion that when people come down with the flu, they rush headlong to their laptops and search "flu," "flu symptoms," "thermometer," or "can you pick up germs through kissing people you don't know?"

So the idea that the Google engineers have come up with is to track these aggregate searches so that the government can warn certain regions when the flu is coming their way.… Read more

In Germany it's apparently OK to have non-employees roam the offices, while in Brazil corporate secrets are commonly shared with family members, and even with total strangers. These are some of the results of a survey (PDF) commissioned by Cisco Systems and released Tuesday.

"It's interesting to see the cultural differences in terms of what's allowed and what's not allowed in different countries," said Marie Hattar, vice president of network and security solutions at Cisco. "If you look towards doing a data leakage prevention strategy, you've got to consider physical security as … Read more

With information technology, you can look at problems and solutions in lots of different ways. For end users and academics, this can lead to a lot of experimentation, skunk works projects, and trial-and-error. But that is not the case when it comes to technology vendors. Start-ups also see lots of ways to solve problems, but they are bound by business plans, directors, and funding to pick their battles and build focused solutions. Some make the right choice and get lucky, some don't.

As an example, I offer two different solution types for data security: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and … Read more

We are an industry of Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs). Everyone tries to categorize what they do with them.

Some like ERP stick around for years, while others like Enterprise Optical Networking (EON) come and go without much fanfare. On occasion, however, the industry creates a TLA to define an industry trend, but as the market and technology develop the TLA no longer fits.

This explanation aptly describes the situation with Data Loss Prevention (DLP). A few years ago, DLP vendors like Vericept and Vontu made hay by providing a network-based gateway appliance that would scan IP packets looking for confidential … Read more

When we first spotted ScienceDaily's report on a research project to invent the uncrashable car, our imagination went wild: Reactive armor? A high-density chassis more durable than an aircraft's black box? Laser beams to disable oncoming vehicles?

The reality, unfortunately, isn't nearly as exciting. Instead of making cool gadgets to save lives, the PReVENT project is more software than hardware. It uses existing technology that, in event of a possible collusion, allows the car's intelligent system to take over and execute evasive maneuvers.

Despite using currently available equipment, it will be some time before we see … Read more