Identity Management: Features

Whether it is for an investigation, a whistle-blower statement, a prank or just extreme paranoia, you may have a need for anonymously sending messages. The following five tools provide an easy to use way to communicate incognito with Internet surfing, emails, phone calls and text messages. While these tools have their limitations, they do provide an Investigator a great way to hide his identity, gather intelligence, and communicate secretly when needed.

Chris Nickerson is willing to push it about as far as a person can go when it comes to security assessments. The founder of Lares, a security consultancy in Colorado, Nickerson conducts what he calls "Red Team Assessments" for clients. He is paid to try and dupe a client, and the client's employees, to give them a clear picture of the weak spots in their security plan. He then advises them on how to shore up defenses more effectively in the event a real criminal comes knocking.

Facebook's Application Verification Program, controversial due to its concept of charging developers to have their applications certified as "trustworthy," has run into technical problems.

Computer networks in the academic world are a lot like the Wild West: It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad, and the sheriff's ability to maintain order is severely limited.

Role mining and discovery: The ability to collect user access and authorization information from a variety of resources, associate this data with candidate roles and responsibilities, propose alternative roles and leverage decisions made about the data on an ongoing basis.

The role management software vendor community is relatively young, and as such, Burton Group says there is no clear market leader. Vendors can be categorized into two segments: general purpose solutions and embedded solutions.

If there is a Holy Grail in the information security industry, it surely is the answer to the question, "How secure is secure enough?"

Remember the old M&M analogy - security is like an M&M candy, hard shell on the outside, soft on the inside. In other words, put up firewalls, built a strong perimeter and you're good to go. Of course, nobody believes that M&M-type security is sufficient in today's world of insider threats, data leakage, mobile workers, thumb drives and sophisticated malware. So, what's the new metaphor? We asked around and came up with a number of interesting and useful ways to think about enterprise security.

Ah, youth. Ready to take on the world, today's generation of dynamic, tech-immersed youngsters have grown up alongside the Internet. Firsthand, and sometimes single-handedly, they have advanced some of today's hottest technology trends, from peer-to-peer networking, to massively multiplayer online games, to social networks and instant messaging. And along the way, a small, sociopathic number of them have behaved very, very badly.

We've known for a long time that requiring just a user name and password to get on the network or to access personal information on a Web site isn't the tightest security posture, but there weren't a lot of good alternatives, and there wasn't that much pressure to change.