Jamey Heary

Apple is targeting to have about 85 million Facetime video conferencing enabled devices sold by the end of 2011. Facetime or Skype video calling are super easy to use, integrated and work great but almost never get used. OK, that is pure speculation on my part. I don't know for a fact that it rarely gets used, but it sure seems that way with the folks I know. I was excited about the Facetime feature before I bought my iPhone 4 many months ago but I still have yet to use it. Not even once. If you had asked me if I would use Facetime before I bought my phone I would have answered an emphatic absolutely. Needless to say, I am very surprised that myself, my friends and the colleagues I've asked say they very, very rarely use the video conferencing features offered on their iOS phones.

It gets even more unexpected when you consider that I, and most of my colleagues, use telepresence HD video conferencing about once a week, use webex video conferencing more than once a week on our laptops, and use skype video conferencing at least once a month or more on our laptops. So it isn't that we are anti-video conferencing. In fact, I love doing telepresence sessions with customers because we get so much more done than over a voice only call. So what's going on with iOS video conferencing? Why does it seem like nobody is using it?

Occasionally folks forget about covering the fundamentals of security and start off down a rabbit hole following some shiny new technology that turns out to be just a rat hole. With today's limited security budgets you need to be sure that you've adequately covered your highest risk areas before moving on to other things. The high-risk areas are, of course, not the same for everyone and will change on you fairly frequently. The bad guys are always mixing it up; the attacks we see prevalent today are not those that we saw just a few years ago. Thus the reason for this article, to take a look at the top 5 security solutions you can put in place today to cover the widest scope of current and emerging threats. In many respects these solutions are considered obvious "no brainers". But, you'd be surprised by how many companies (big and small) that don't have them in place. Many times it is the obvious that temporarily escapes us (or at least escapes those holding the purse strings ☺)

These 5 items working together will stop more cyber attacks on your data, network and users than any other 5 items in the marketplace today. There are lots of other very useful security solutions on the market but when it comes to picking the top five most effective and readily available ones here are my choices:

Ever get that tech support call from your parents saying, "My computer is slow all of a sudden" or "I have all sorts of weird things popping up on my screen"? You then troubleshoot the problems only to find out that malware, spyware, viruses or other such nastiness is the culprit. To be sure you eradicate all the bugs you resort to a full format and reinstall of everything thus taking you hours. If you've been there, done that here are five basic security tips to provide to your parents that, if followed, are sure to credit you back hours of your time.

I bet I'm not the only one who provides some tech support services to their family members, especially to your parents. We don't mind providing the help, heck sometimes its even fun doing the forensics right? But for you and your parents it would obviously be better if the bugs never found their way onto the computer in the first place. The generational technology knowledge gap between our senior citizens and their offspring is the largest we've ever experienced in the history of mankind. It is also unlikely that humans will experience another such generational tech knowledge gap in the next few hundred years. Technology, at least in the developed world, is now an important, engrained part of our culture and likely to remain so in the future. So, recognizing that we are in a unique place in human history do your part to help bridge the gap through education and awareness.

If you want to hack a corporation fast, Social Engineering (SE) techniques work every time and more often than not it works the first time. I'm talking about in your face, Mano-a-mano, live in the flesh social engineering techniques. Securing the information that is in the human mind is a monumental, colossal, epic, task compared with securing digital data! So it is no surprise that it is also the largest gap in a corporations IT security.

The security industry is constantly trying to create techno widgets to help us with this huGraphic: Diego Aguirreman problem, but to date there are not bona fide solutions available. If you give someone access, no matter how many hoops you make him or her go through to get there, then they are a human risk and subject to social engineering attacks.

In case you haven't been paying attention, Botnet DDoS attacks passed the 40 Gigabits/sec mark in 2008, according to Arbor Networks. The sheer size of today's Botnets has reached into the mind-boggling realm of 1.9 million bots in a single Botnet. Couple that with the fact that Botnet DDoS attacks are one of the hardest assaults to defend against and you have a real nightmare scenario on your hands. This is why DDoS attacks are the most common method employed by extortionists to attempt to hold online merchants hostage for ransom. It's big business for criminals and business is good.

Here is a common scenario: bad guy employs a Botnet army to saturate and take out of service something that is of value to you. The targets range from just a DDoS to saturate one critical server to saturating your entire connection to the Internet, effectively taking down all your Internet service. In some cases, the bad guy will launch his attack first, take down the web services, and then ask for the ransom money. Other times the bad guy will just send in the ransom request with the threat that if it is not met by X days they will take their website down.