http://www.databreaches.net/?p=11224
First Annual French Ponemon Study Shows the High Cost of Data Breaches for French Organizations
April 15, 2010 by admin
Privacy and information management research firm Ponemon Institute, together with PGP Corporation, a global leader in enterprise data protection, today announced the results of the first annual study into the costs incurred by French organisations after experiencing a data breach. The “2009 Annual Study: French Cost of a Data Breach” report, compiled by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by PGP Corporation, found that each lost customer record cost on average of euro 89 in 2009. The ex-post response is the main contributor to this expense (euro 31), followed jointly by lost business and detection and escalation of incidents (euro 27). With no data breach notification law currently applicable in France, it is unsurprising that data breach notification accounts for only euro 4 of the average cost.
… One of the most striking findings of the 2009 study is the significant difference in costs incurred in the various sectors, particularly in the public versus private sector. While the public sector faced average costs of euro 31 per lost record, the cost increased to as much as euro 147 per record in the pharmaceutical industry and euro 140 in the financial industry. These were also the industries that experienced the highest level of customer turnover due to diminished customer confidence and trust, a factor which had no impact on the public sector.
… ”Should the new data breach notification bill that has just been passed by the French Senate be adopted by the National Assembly, the costs associated with handling incidents will surely increase.
Post data breach responses
The organisations participating in the research identified encryption and strengthened perimeter controls as the top two technology responses following a data breach with 25 percent and 21 percent respectively. However, the most popular preventative measures taken were additional manual procedures and controls (53 percent) and training and awareness programs (46 percent)
.... A copy of the study, including a full breakdown of the various direct and indirect costs impacting organisations, is available from PGP Corporation at: www.encryptionreports.com.
Source: PR Newswire
Interesting idea: rate computer security by grade level. I wonder what percentage would be at the college graduate level?
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=11228
Boy, 9, accused of hacking into Fairfax schools’ computer system
April 15, 2010 by admin
Tom Jackman reports:
Are you smarter than a third-grader? Because the online education system used by the Fairfax County public schools apparently is not.
Police say a 9-year-old McLean boy hacked into the Blackboard Learning System used by the county school system to change teachers’ and staff members’ passwords, change or delete course content, and change course enrollment.
[...]
The Fairfax schools’ network security manager reported the breach to police March 22, according to a search warrant affidavit written by Detective Brooke D. Ware. The manager found that most of those targeted worked at Spring Hill Elementary or Churchill Road Elementary schools and that a student’s account at Spring Hill had been enabled with administrator privileges, Ware wrote.
Read more in the Washington Post.
You could fall asleep reading the title, but that's bureaucrats for you.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=8920
Statement of Glenn A. Fine, Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice before the House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties concerning “Report by the Office of the Inspector General on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Use of Exigent Letters and Other Informal Requests for Telephone Records”
April 14, 2010 by Dissent
The testimony, here, makes clear that the FBI misused and abused exigent letters. In many cases, there was no real emergency and in many cases where the FBI said that subpoenas had been sought, they had not been sought at all. Fine’s testimony also describes how the FBI engaged in other improper practices such as obtaining phone records on hot numbers without any legal process, improperly using administrative subpoenas, inaccurate statements to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and improper requests for reporters’ telephone numbers without required approval.
Part of the investigation and report dealt with how having representatives of three communication providers “on site” with the FBI facilitated a more casual approach to “exigent” letters and contributed to a blurring and weakening of required protections and procedures.
There’s a lot more to the report, including reference to another unspecified legal authority that the FBI claims it could have (but has not) used to obtain telephone records without relying on the NSL provisions of the ECPA.
What is clear from the testimony is that after 9-11, the government attempted to speed up acquisition of information for identifying potential terrorists, but that the sense of urgency led to wholesale disregard for proper procedure and protections, with all levels of the FBI being responsible for the misuse and abuse of procedures.
Will they also predict which voters will find this offensive enough to vote their congressman out of office?
http://gizmodo.com/5517231/crime-prediction-software-is-here-and-its-a-very-bad-idea
Crime Prediction Software Is Here and It's a Very Bad Idea
There are no naked pre-cogs inside glowing jacuzzis yet, but the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!
They will use this software on juvenile delinquents, using a series of variables to determine the potential for these people to commit another crime. Depending on this probability, they will put them under specific re-education programs. Deepak Advani—vice president of predictive analytics at IBM—says the system gives "reliable projections" so governments can take "action in real time" to "prevent criminal activities?"
One idea of “guidance”
Thailand Cracks Down On Twitter, Facebook, Etc.
Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 14, @04:22PM
An anonymous reader writes
"The ongoing poitical turmoil in Thailand has inspired the country's Ministry of Information, Computers, and Telecommunications to issue a stern warning that all users of the Internet in Thailand must 'use the internet in the right way or with appropriate purpose and avoid disseminating information that could create misunderstanding or instigate violent actions among the public', that 'all popular websites and social networks such as facebook, twitter, hi5 and my space [sic] will be under thorough watch,' and that 'Violators will be prosecuted by law with no compromise.' Thailand has draconian anti-lèse majesté laws which are routinely abused in order to settle political scores and silence dissent, and recently implemented a so-called 'Computer Crimes Act' which appears to be almost solely focused on thoughtcrimes and censorship, rather than dealing with, you know, actual crime. Several Web forums have recently been shut down, their operators charged because they failed to delete 'harmful posts' quickly enough to suit the Thai authorities."
How (and why) would you search this archive?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024020.html
April 14, 2010
Library of Congress Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive
News release: "Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions."
See also Tweet Preservation
(Related) A contrast of style (and an interesting idea for legislation)
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=8939
To tweet or to delete?
April 15, 2010 by Dissent
Peter Fleischer blogs:
How would you resolve the conflict between the cultural imperative to archive human knowledge and the privacy imperative to delete some of it? To put this in perspective, compare the approaches of the US Library of Congress and the French Senate.
As reported by The New York Times, the “the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge and cultural history, …will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.”
Meanwhile, the French Senate is moving in the opposite direction, as it explores a law to legislate “the right to be forgotten”. The French Senate has been considering a proposed law which would amend the current data protection legislation to include, among other things, a broader right for individuals to insist on deletion of their personal information. The proposed law in France would require organisations to delete personal information after a specified length of time or when requested by the individual concerned.
Read more on Peter Fleischer: Privacy…?
(Related) Obviously, Google thinks you will want to search it.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/024023.html
April 14, 2010
Google search across the Twitter archive
Official Google Blog: "Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz, expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets. With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful. Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period."
Interesting statistics
Beryl Zyskind Report - Expected Web Trends of 2010
Press Release Source: Verified Ltd On Wednesday April 14, 2010, 9:00 am EDT
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., April 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Beryl Zyskind, an authority internet watchdog agency, concluded it's 2009 internet report by suggesting that Ecommerce, Digital TV, and Mobile Search Engines are on the rise while technologies like p2p, VoIP, and selling music online are at a record low.
Based on the Dept. of Commerce's Quarterly E-Commerce Sales report - online retail ecommerce rose to $32.4 billion - which accounts for 3.6% of all US sales during the second quarter of 2009.
According to Zyskind's Report, websites like eBay.com, Faljo.com, & Amazon are expected to increase their sales margins by as much as 18% in 2010. "Going to Walmart or Target – often costs more than just money. It costs time and honestly, you're never really sure if you got the best deal for your money," says Didi Ehrlich, an international marketing consultant while explaining "The consumer's ability to locate, access, and compare products in real-time to get the best possible deal is what makes these ecommerce sites so lucrative"
… "Today, there are more cellphones on earth than computers & TV's put together – which has opened up a vacuum of marketing potential," says SEO Expert, Daniel Cohen who suggests, "we should all be on the lookout for wifi search engines."
Okay, this is scary. I can't see the free world being led by the “Twitter-in-Chief”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20002555-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Meet Russian President Medvedev, Internet geek
by Declan McCullagh April 14, 2010 5:28 PM PDT
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev already has a LiveJournal.com page, a video blog on kremlin.ru, and a Twitter account is in the works.
But the full extent of Medvedev's unalloyed geekiness wasn't apparent until a question-and-answer session in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Putin was in town for the 47-nation nuclear summit.
During an appearance at the center-left Brookings Institution, the head of the Russian Federation suggested that he and President Obama should dispense with their legions of aides and chat on iPhones through text messaging instead.
A lot of nifty but biased charts. Somehow I think they reflect my bias too
http://www.docuticker.com/?p=34343
Chart Book Exposes Spendathon in Graphic Terms
Source: Heritage Foundation
The federal government is spending more per household than ever before. At this rate, by the time this spring’s college graduates turn 67, federal spending on just three programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — could consume two-fifths of the nation’s economic output.
The 2010 Budget Chart Book, a highly visual online resource just released by The Heritage Foundation, shines a light on such ominous tax-and-spend trends in the federal budget. These trends threaten not only the nation’s economy but its very security, Heritage analysts warn.
Visitors to heritage.org/BudgetChartBook may download, post or e-mail any of 39 information graphics, 12 of which are new to this updated edition. Included are links to relevant Heritage research and tools for bookmarking, embedding and information sharing through Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds.
Laugh until you cry? Colorado is 42nd, with a mere $15,40 per person! It will take more than that to buy my vote!
http://www.docuticker.com/?p=34383
Earmark Spending $16.5 Billion in CAGW’s 2010 Congressional Pig Book
The Pig Book Summary profiles the most egregious examples, breaks down pork per capita by state, and presents the annual Oinker Awards. All 9,129 projects are listed in a searchable database on CAGW’s website www.cagw.org.
So many tools, so little time.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/12-great-free-video-tutorial-sites-brush-tech-skills/
12 Great Free Video Tutorial Sites To Brush Up Your Tech Skills
For ALL my students
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ten-best-antivirus-programs/
The 10 Best Free Anti-Virus Programs
[My pick for best security tool:
Common Sense 2011
This one’s unusual in that it’s free and considered by far the best protection out there, yet can’t be downloaded anywhere. Without it, however, even the best security software is rendered useless.
If you haven’t already figured this out, Common Sense 2011 isn’t a product you can download so much as it is a state of mind. If you’re going to be free of viruses and malware you need to use your head while browsing the web. The most important thing to remember is this: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is—and your computer will probably be compromised.
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