Bob Gourley's Blog – November 2011 Archive (31)

On Friday, December 16th, 2011, FedCyber.com will host a webinar featuring one of the great champions of secure code, Mr. Michael Howard.

For more information and to register for this event see:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/551297622

More on the…

Earlier this month, a pump burned out mysteriously at a water plant in Springfield, Illinois. Log data traced the problem back several months to a command from an IP address in Russia that forced the pump to turn on and off repeatedly until it broke. When this news was leaked to the media from a cyber expert convinced that we were under attack by Russian hackers, a media frenzy ensued that made it all the…

Imagine if every single American citizen had his or her personally identifiable information, such as full names and addresses, leaked onto the Internet. This cybersecurity and privacy nightmare might seem implausible, but that’s exactly what happened in Israel, where 9 million records, those of every living citizen and some deceased, were leaked online and eventually sold on the black market.

According…

Editor’s note: As a disclaimer, CTOvision.com editor in chief Bob Gourley is an advisor to Fixmo. So take that into account when reading this exciting news.

The critical importance of mobile risk management (MRM) is a topic of high interest to almost all enterprises. Fixmo is a firm with solutions that directly address needs in…

Flash will come out as 11.1 for mobile devices, and that's it.

Last week, Adobe announced that they were dropping development for Flash for mobile devices and TV. According to Adobe:

“Our future work with…

The Government Big Data Solutions Award was established to highlight innovative solutions and facilitate the exchange of best practices, lessons learned and creative ideas for addressing Big Data challenges. The top five nominees and overall winner was announced at Hadoop World in New York City on November 8 2011.

The Government Big Data Solutions Award Program is…

Bob Gourley was recently interviewed for WashingtonExec’s New Series: WashingtonExec 2012 Prediction Issue: Execs Speak Out. 2012 is fast approaching, and with it comes big changes in the Federal IT industry.  WashingtonExec is giving local executives the opportunity to share their thoughts…

Do you have a program or project that is evaluating “big data” approaches to the solution. You are not alone. With the explosion of data hitting almost every facet of IT, project leaders and program managers everywhere are downloading and evaluating the open source Apache Hadoop.

Since the word Hadoop is so frequently used to refer to the entire suite of open source…

As new attacks and vulnerabilities are being rapidly discovered on expanding defense networks, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a new way to keep pace with attackers with its Cyber Fast Track program to quickly fund cybersecurity research. Cyber Fast Track increases the agency’s agility by looking at…

Open source software has historically had a hard time competing with its big budget proprietary rivals but, as Bob Gourley explains in an interview with Federal Computer Week, “Hadoop is totally unique in many ways.”

There is currently no proprietary match for Hadoop in the…

On Friday, December 16th, 2011, FedCyber.com will host a webinar featuring one of the great champions of secure code, Mr. Michael Howard.

For more information and to register for this event see:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/551297622

More on the…

The state of computer security is in continual change. The only constant in this game is the very dynamic nature of defense and offense. If you are a defender you will always have a hard job. You

will always need to be on the lookout for ways to succeed in the face of a dynamic, never ending threat.

This special report is a summary of the Cyber Security category of the…

If you are like me, social media is already a large part of your life.  I spend at least some time each day checking in with my friends, regardless of where they are in the world.  Most of them do not live near me, or at least in not in my immediate vicinity.  There is a newcomer to the social media world that wants to take a different approach to social and connect you to your neighbors, and…

Photo credit www.howstuffworks.com

Virtual reality (VR) is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence…

Microsoft has shown once again that it can act decisively and smartly improve its offerings in doing so. It has “disrupted” itself in a way that will be positive for the community and probably the Microsoft bottom line.

In a November 11 blog…

NERC is an international, independent, not-for-profit organization, whose mission is to ensure the reliability of the bulk power system in North America. Here is a bit about them from their website at http://nerc.com :

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) mission is to ensure the reliability of the North…

GSA is helping secure Federal networks

GSA provides many services to federal users, including communications services. They help agencies tap into the best communications industry can offer and does that in ways that can enhance security. One key method is MTIPS, which stands for Managed Trusted Internet Protocol…

On December 1, 2011 between 8am and 5pm the National Association of Broadcasters will hold an event focusing on motion imagery lessons learned from the broadcasting community. The event will be a great opportunity to learn more about collection, analysis, reporting, production and dissemination of complex news and sports events.

These are topics of interest to many, but the event should be of special interest to members of the geospatial community. The thought leaders behind this…

While PCs will likely remain with us for a long time, the PC era has come to a close. Bob Gourley discussed this transition and the rise of mobile in an interview with IDG’s Bill Laberis at the HP Protect 2011 conference on Monday, September 12, 2011.

Though there are currently 1.2 billion PCs in the world, there are 4 billion active…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhttnIOmDp8′

We’ve already established that perfect security is impossibly in cyberspace, especially with the move to the cloud, the consumerization of IT, and the rise of mobile. Still, even with current transformations, IT can still get more secure as it evolves. Recently, HP announced an enterprise security strategy to address these new challenges, which was described in an…