Posts tagged data protection
Privacy by Design comes to power: Protecting personal information in the Smart Grid
Feb 4th
The current electrical grid is seen by some as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. But it is increasingly out of date and overburdened. Efforts to modernize the grid – making it smarter, stronger, and greener – are gathering momentum, especially in North America and Europe.
Ann Cavoukian
Right now, the Smart Grid is very much in its infancy, existing mostly in the form of plans, projects, and small pilots. But ultimately, development of the Smart Grid is expected to enable a two-way flow of information and electricity that will provide major advantages for the system, and give consumers more choices about how, when, and how much electricity they use.
We all stand to benefit from the Smart Grid. And we stand to benefit most if it is well designed and well implemented. An important aspect of that, in my view, is making sure that the Smart Grid is also smart about privacy.
My office has been actively advocating on behalf of building privacy into the Smart Grid for some time. In November 2009, we released a white paper with the Future of Privacy Forum, entitled SmartPrivacy for the Smart Grid: Embedding Privacy into the Design of Electricity Conservation. The paper called attention to the privacy issues related to personal data generated and collected by the Smart Grid, and argued that improving the grid can be achieved without sacrificing privacy. Read the rest of this entry »
How cyber crooks break CAPTCHAs
Aug 11th
The per centage of spam containing shortened hyperlinks has increased significantly over the last year. As far as spammers are concerned, any tactic that makes it harder to block their spam emails is going to be exploited. These shortened hyperlinks contain reputable and legitimate domains, making it harder for traditional anti-spam filters to identify the messages as spam.
Paul Wood
Analysis in the latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report revealed that URL-shortened spam hit a one day peak of 18 per cent, or 23.4 billion spam emails, on April 30, 2010. This doubled last year’s peak level of 9.3 per cent of spam, or more than 10 billion spam emails, on July 28, 2009.
While botnets are often the source of short URL spam, 28 per cent of this type of spam originated from sources not linked to a known botnet, such as unidentified spam-sending botnets or non-botnet sources such as webmail accounts created using CAPTCHA-breaking tools.
How to Out-Secure the Competition in 5 Easy Steps
Jul 26th
Every year, we encounter a wide variety of companies, firms of different sizes that play distinct roles in their respective industries. Some are in a position to mitigate all sorts of risks to information assets, but they are in the minority.
The vast majority of companies have adopted controls that are considered standard (firewall, anti-virus, locks on server room doors, etc), but there is a general consensus among the staff that the really valuable assets of the firm continue to be exposed to risk. Management knows this but is often afraid of spiraling security costs once the decision is made to at least look into the company’s level of exposure, called the company’s security posture.
Claudiu Popa
I have compiled a list of no-nonsense recommendations to help anyone tackle that challenge, and mitigate the vast majority of the risk to their business. These are simple, require little effort and their corresponding investment can easily be contained. Here they are: Read the rest of this entry »
