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Yet another breach of sensitive, unencrypted data is making news in the United Kingdom. This time the breach puts Royal Air Force staff at serious risk of being targeted for blackmail by foreign intelligence services or others.

The breach involves audio recordings with high ranking officers who were being interviewed in-depth for a security clearance. In the interviews, the officers disclosed information about extra-marital affairs, drug abuse, visits to prostitutes, medical conditions, criminal convictions and debt histories — information the military needed to determine their security risk. (link)

Bill Margeson, co-founder, president, and CEO of CBL Data Recovery Technologies (www.cbltech.com), says the notebook is becoming the computing platform of choice vs. the larger PC workstation. He says, “The notebook affords individuals mobility, but not without risks to both the hardware and the corporate data stored on it. Notebooks are more prone to being bumped, jarred, and dropped, thus increasing the risk of physical damage and subsequent data loss.”

Margeson says IT may not have to change its approach to PC management, but simply extend it to encompass notebooks and other devices. He adds, “As enterprises face today’s economic challenges, some may be transitioning to flexible office environments. While employers may reduce the total work space to house employees to improve their bottom line, employees who work remotely from the convenience of their homes or client sites do present challenges to the staff who must manage remote IT assets, which include notebooks and PDAs, but more importantly, the data which resides on them.” (link)

That made recovering the DVD data even more important. Two local data recovery firms had already said the videotaped interview on the DVD was unrecoverable. But by chance, Isaac's parents had a neighbor who was a retired Seagate employee. Having heard of Seagate, Isaac decided to contact the company about a medium they didn't even manufacture, hoping they could recover the data.

Seagate's i365 subsidiary has a data recovery service -- Seagate Recovery Services (SRS) -- that took on the job of trying to bring the November 2006 police interview back to life. SRS loaded the DVD into a player, but "there was nothing on the DVD.

When IEEE 1667 is in place, the risks associated with this vulnerability decrease substantially because only authenticated devices will be accepted. I can provide my employees with specific types of IEEE 1667-compliant devices that can be authenticated and used. All others, including that device you bought at Fry's Electronics, won't work. Assuming that you can audit the use of these devices, this provides security without compromising usability--a win-win in the security management world. (link)

As part of a compliance project launched one and a half years ago, Brent Zimmer, systems specialist at the university, was working with attorneys and archivists to determine which data was most important to keep and for how long. But it soon became clear that it was just as important to identify which data should be thrown away. Zimmer was aware of the importance of being able to quickly produce required information during litigation, "but the thing we never thought about was keeping data too long," he says. The risk is keeping data that you wouldn't otherwise be required to produce, but as long as it's discoverable, it could be used as evidence against you. (link)

Buying faster switches might not be the only way to amp up performance across data center networks, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, who this week proposed a network architecture that would enable commodity Ethernet switches to deliver better performance at a lower cost than their 10 Gigabit Ethernet counterparts.

Amin Vahdat, computer science professor at UC San Diego, presented research findings at SIGCOMM 2008 in Seattle that laid out how the principles behind clustered computing could be applied to network architecture to improve scalability and performance at reduced costs. (link)

No matter which operating system is currently installed on your computer, the number one concern is always the persistent necessity to keep all data secure. If you are among those who chose to use Vista on their PCs and laptops, like the rest of us, you are probably experiencing difficulties in finding effective system utilities that can optimize your work with the operating system. And it just looks like the time is right for all Windows Vista users to start looking for the solution that would allow them to effectively backup Windows Mail.

So what do you do if you haven’t been using a backup plan and your system crashes or a virus wipes out your files? You will probably have to call in the pros at this time. There are many companies that specialize in recovering data from any type of media for just about any type of system failure. Some of the companies also specialize in recovering certain types of files that have been corrupted. For example, if you have a corrupted Microsoft Excel file, look for a company that specifies expertise with that type of file.

Spam (and the malware it contains) may be a tremendous concern to most IT companies, but information from a new Trend Micro survey suggests that it has become more of a managed concern, and is being superseded as a top priority threat by another issue: data leaks. While they may or may not be intentional, data leaks have the potential to expose thousands or even millions of records to theft.

Despite growing concerns over data security, Trend Micro reports that only some 46 percent of companies even have leak prevention strategies in place. That's surprisingly few, given the string of high-profile data losses in the past 12 months. Some of these incidents might seem to focus more on device loss and less on data leaks, but in many incidents, the occurrence of one automatically results in the other. If the FBI loses 160 laptops, it has effectively leaked all of the data they collectively contain into the public domain. (link)

A study released Monday by the privacy-focused Ponemon Institute and funded by e-mail marketing firm Strongmail reveals a disturbing disconnect in companies between the executives tasked with protecting customer data and marketing departments, which use the data for advertising purposes or share it with third parties.

In response to a survey answered by 500 privacy and 900 marketing executives in industries ranging from health care to financial services, more than a third of marketing execs said they don't place any limits on the data they share with third parties, such as e-mail marketing agencies or online advertisers. By contrast, 75% of privacy officers believe that their companies limit the sharing of customer data.
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