Stories by: Michael Crawford

One of the best kept disaster recovery and business continuity secrets in the industry is not even on companies' radar: that's the failure to push teleworking for staff as an ideal fallback measure.

The second request for tender (RFT) for the Australian Access Card was released yesterday for a contractor to implement both the card and key management system.

Internet Security Systems (ISS) and MessageLabs released a synopsys of 2006 security trends yesterday, with both companies revealing a marked increase in spam throughout the year.

The quarterly Unisys security index released today has found the majority of Australians surveyed particularly savvy when it comes to personal information security, in particular choosing a PIN (personal identification number), destroying bank or credit card statements or even reading the privacy policies of organizations they have dealings with.

The festive season has brought along a heavy increase in global spam, with China and South Korea now leading the world in spewing out the number of phishing e-mails populating the globe.

The 2006 Ernst & Young global information security survey has found organizations worldwide are failing under the weight of vendor risk management in outsourcing relationships, but internally have woken up to the relationship between information security and effective risk management.

Global spam has increased nearly 100 percent year on year according to current statistics from the IronPort Threat Operation Centre - a key driver of which is the proliferation of image-based spam.

A former US Department of Defense director who oversaw the implementation of 11 million smartcards for military personnel met with federal government agencies in Canberra last week.

Australian IT managers last week came out in support of the use of keylogging software to monitor staff access to customer records after Centrelink admitted it had been undertaking employee surveillance for the past year.

Online merchants will find meeting the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS) neither intrusive nor expensive if the quarterly penetration tests are mandated in Australia.