Security Leadership

A marathon hack event held over a June weekend in Melbourne attracted more than 50 developers and designers, and a dozen subject matter and technical experts to ‘hack for humanity’. They volunteered their time to create open source solutions for communities impacted by natural disasters and climate change. These prototypes are available to assist in disaster relief planning, emergency management and community recovery.

C-level executives are more aware than ever about threats to information security.

To use Cloud computing securely requires companies to know where their data is stored and who has access to it. Ironically, the reason Cloud is so popular is because organisations don't want to worry about these details.

So can the issue be solved by adhering to standards? Increasing legislation? Maybe we need a global technical disaster to ‘sober up’ an industry drunk on the power of Moore's Law.

The revelation of serious long-term vulnerabilities in the popular Ruby on Rails web programming framework is just one of three events in the last 72 hours that have convinced me that improvement in web application security is impossible -- unless both developers and business managers seriously lift their game.

It’s not a secret, public and private sector organisations know the current approach to Information Security Awareness isn’t working because User Awareness jumped to 8th place, up from 31st on the 2011 Defence* Signals Directorate, Top 35 Strategies to Mitigate Targeted Intrusions.

ISPs in Australia have for some time been notifying users about the likelihood that their computers have been compromised by malware. Now under the icode, the system has been formalised. Education and remediation tools are being made available to suspected victims.

Australians are increasingly relying on the internet in their everyday lives, from banking and shopping, through to using emails, social networking and blogs to keep in touch with family and friends. They are using a range of devices such as smart phones, tablets, computer game consoles and other devices to go online.

Some of the world’s largest corporations have recently fallen victim to hacking attacks and identify data theft, while other online businesses have been compromised and sidelined for days or weeks, losing millions of dollars in revenue and suffering significant reputational damage. It’s never been more important for companies to act in order to avoid becoming the next victim of identity data theft.