climate and comms

The sheer volume of reportage on hacking is overwhelming.   The sites being hit are the ones that you and I use every day.   Some provide useful information, some, valuable services and others perhaps just news or trivia.   We use them multiple times a day – sometimes without even being fully aware that we are,  like DropBox.   We use these sites  to store personal and business information, to connect us with potential clients, employers and employees, to help us choose insurance providers, to send us our groceries and some, to just play on.   Dropbox allows us to seamlessly log in by re-referencing a cookie they have planted on our computer to ‘verify’ our identity.   LinkedIn also uses the same technique when we log in.    A user name and password.  How secure is that ?    Well,  not very,  given that both of these sites have been hacked and your and my perso...

You have all heard of the Magic Quadrant.  An industry benchmark by which the, mostly, established players like to measure themselves against each other.    To quote Wikipedia (that repository of all Internet wisdom ;-)) “ the Magic Quadrant aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants, thus possibly enabling a company to be a stronger competitor for that market. ”   The axes of the ‘Quadrant’ are ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’ and the methodology used to apply the ranking remains a closely guarded secret (or mystery depending on how you look at it.)   The MQ applies to many niches in the tech sector.  I want to consider the  User Authentication MQ.  Notably because the space is getting much media attention these days.   Hackers !  Wikipedia says that the aim of the analysis it is to  “ . .enable a company to be a stronger competitor for that market “ ...

In April this year,  Epsilon Data Management LLC  (one of the world's largest providers of marketing-email services) , a division of Alliance Data Systems Corp issued a statement, " On March 30th, an incident was detected where a subset of Epsilon clients' customer data were exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon's email system. The information that was obtained was limited to email addresses and/or customer names only ." ( http://www.fastcompany.com/1744738/the-epsilon-breach-should-you-be-angry-worried-or-bored ) When it's all said and done, the Epsilon hack may be the largest name and email address breach in the history of the Internet.  Epsilon handles more than 40 billion emails annually and more than 2,200 global brands. If you are thinking you are safe because you opted-out of marketing emails, think again ( http://blogs.computerworld.com/18079/epsilon_breach_hack_of_the_century ) Epsilon required their customer...