Privacy: Opinions

Security expert Gadi Evron has plenty of experience helping governments fight cyber attacks. In this column, he offers a roadmap companies can use to prevent computer espionage.

The proliferation and popularity of collaborative Web 2.0 sites – there are around 250,000 new registrations to Facebook everyday – has changed the threat landscape and the way businesses need to think about security. Each year, newer technologies and weapons are being unleashed to leave Web users surprised, annoyed and at greater risk.‘Whaling’ or ‘spear phishing’, is one such threat and refers to phishing scams which specifically target high-worth individuals.

Business isn't what it used to be.

Talk to anyone who attends Black Hat USA conferences and you'll hear about how boring the talks are, how nobody learned anything new, how the hacks were known last year -- not to mention the ridiculous posers. Ask those same attendees if they plan to attend next year, and they say "yeah" as fast as a poker player pushing all in with pocket aces.

Harrison Ford is ticked off again. But not because the bad guys have hijacked Air Force One or kidnapped his wife from a Paris hotel room; this time they've swiped his identity to break into the bank where he works and steal millions of dollars.

Companies are not embracing encryption as a way to protect sensitive data. According to Ponemon Institute's 2005 National Encryption Survey, only 4.2 percent of companies responding to our survey say their organizations have an enterprisewide encryption plan.

Within the next 10 years the convergence of multiple technologies will thrust people into a world where nothing is secret

I spent a very interesting hour with Phil Libin, president of CoreStreet, learning about the company's method for providing "massively scalable validation products for identity management and access control" - that's how CoreStreet describes its business. First, though, we had to get over a couple of semantic hurdles which points up one of the things slowing down the convergence of pure security products with pure identity management tools.