Malware attacks seem to be evolving. The traditional viruses, Trojan horses, botnets, and phishing attacks are still a threat, but the next generation malware takes insidious to a whole new level. Thankfully, there’s a silver lining as well.
A new threat dubbed Shamoon has been identified that steals sensitive data, then wipes the target computer and effectively renders it useless. Shamoon--along with Stuxnet, Duqu, Flame, and Gauss--represents a new era of malware that is designed with specific goals in mind, and programmed to fly under the radar and evade detection in most cases.
There is no silver bullet when it comes to encryption. Even the most complex, invulnerable encryption today could be child’s play in the future. The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is publishing new encryption standards for public review to try and keep up with the times and stay a step ahead of the bad guys.
The NIST is a government agency, and its guidelines only really impact other government agencies. However, many security experts and organizations look to the NIST standards as a baseline.
You can implement rock solid network security; enforce strong, complex passwords; and install the best anti-malware tools available. Most security experts agree, however, that there is no security in the world that can guard against human error.
Consider your house--you can have a solid steel door, an industrial strength deadbolt, and an alarm system straight out of a Mission Impossible movie. But if you forget to lock the door or engage the alarm system, it won’t do any good.
Secure data being beamed across the Internet it? Encrypt it. Protect data at rest from being accessed? Encrypt it. It seems like encryption is the answer to all of your security concerns. That’s true to an extent, but even encryption has its limitations.
Encryption is a perfectly viable solution for securing data, but it’s not invulnerable--especially for data at rest, like files stored on backup media. Today’s unbreakable algorithm is tomorrow’s cracked encryption.
It seems Facebook is preparing to roll out a new feature called “Find Friends Nearby”. The feature--which is designed to simplify the process of finding new friends and adding them to your social network--blurs the line a bit between the online social network and real life, and will probably draw the ire of privacy advocates.
First, a little about the feature itself--or at least what we think is known about the as yet unofficial feature. The name implies a feature that will alert you when one of the contacts from your Facebook social network happens to be nearby so you have an opportunity to meet up in real life. However, that isn’t really the way the feature works.
