Security is Headline News

These articles represent just a small sample of stories that affect us all, and create particular burden on enterprise CIOs, CSOs and CISOs. They provide further evidence that the time for complex enterprise security analytics capability is now.

Log management in the age of compliance: 'Bread crumbs' are key to what's happening with your network, July 16, 2007

With each high-profile data breach (such as those at The TJX Companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture) or new regulation, security emphasis seems to shift away from the traditional "keep bad guys out" mentality and toward a layered, in-depth, "What's going on in here?" look at IT activity. Organizations are turning to logs to provide a continuous trail of everything that happens with their IT systems and, more importantly, with their data.

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Vendors Fire Up Data Forensics, July 24, 2006

With CIOs in the financial sector coming under increasing pressure to lock down their data, more vendors are touting data forensics as a way to avoid embarrassing and costly storage snafus.

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CMP CompliancePipeline, September 16, 2005
Survey: Security, Risk Tops Concerns
By Tim Wilson (Courtesy of Network Computing)

Five years ago, everybody in IT--heck, everybody in business--was busily thinking outside the box. It was all about building a new mousetrap to respond to shifting paradigms, replacing legacy technology and business processes with Internet-enabled solutions that would let your enterprise rule the world.

My, how times have changed.

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CIO Insight, September 9, 2005
Pressure Increases, but CIOs Still Struggle to Stop Identity Theft
By Jeffrey Rothfeder

It's been a bad year for privacy.

Since February, when identity thieves conned data aggregator ChoicePoint Inc. out of 145,000 personal records that contained Social Security numbers, addresses and credit accounts, there have been upward of 60 incidents involving lost or stolen confidential data, affecting more than 50 million individual files.

The largest occurred in June, when information from 40 million MasterCard and Visa credit accounts was stolen by hackers who broke into the network of third-party transaction processor CardSystems Solutions Inc. Most of the other episodes pale in comparison, but they're just as potentially harmful to the people whose data was compromised.

But of all the recent, high-profile mishaps, a series of relatively minor incidents has, surprisingly, riled many security experts the most.

The first was in February, when Bank of America Corp. revealed that credit-card information on 1.2 million federal employees had been mislaid en route to a storage facility. A month later, a container of backup computer tapes containing personal information on 600,000 current and former Time Warner Inc. employees was lost in transit between New York City and a storage facility in New Jersey.

On the tapes were Social Security numbers and other data pertaining to such company celebrities as former CEO Jerry Levin and former Chairman Steve Case. Soon after that, backup customer account files belonging to City National Bank, in Los Angeles, also disappeared after they had been put on a truck for shipment to a data repository.

Each of these three cases is still unexplained, and it's unclear whether the records were stolen or simply mishandled. Moreover, the information on the files doesn't appear to have been misused by identity thieves—yet. But although little harm appears to have been done by these episodes, they were nonetheless particularly disturbing, because the culprit in each case was Iron Mountain Inc., a Boston-based records-management company that has built a reputation as the premier protector of essential corporate assets.

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Red Herring, August 11, 2005
New York Signs Security Bill

The state passes law requiring companies and state agencies to divulge data security breaches to customers.

New York Governor George Pataki has signed a bill requiring companies and state agencies to tell New York customers when the security of their data has been compromised.

The legislation was passed in June by New York’s State Senate and signed into law Wednesday. It is modeled after a similar bill passed in California in 2003 in the wake of the ChoicePoint breach, which exposed information on 30,000 customers in California and more than 9,000 in New York.

“The new law applies to businesses and state government agencies that maintain databases when there is a breach involving the acquisition of information such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, drivers licenses, and other vulnerable personal information,” said New York State Assembly member James Brennan (D-Brooklyn), who sponsored the bill.

Under the law, companies that have customers in New York State have to notify the consumer of any breach as soon as possible. The law also requires local governments in New York to develop a policy on doing the same, and gives the New York Attorney General the ability to seek a court order if the company fails to comply.

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To view the referenced California state law, click here.