The Never-Ending Cat and Mouse Game

Paula Musich

Summary Bullets:

• Two legs of the security stool’s people, process and technology equation are routinely underserved.
• Progress toward more relevant and actionable threat intelligence sharing is inching forward.

Cyber thieves continue to improve their game, bringing great creativity, technical skills, good organization, communication and financial backing to their illicit endeavors.  In a fine example of life imitating art, an Ocean’s 12-style gang robbed the UK’s Barclays bank last April, blending a creative mix of system compromise with social engineering in the flesh and technical skills to make off with about $2 million.  As reported in CSO Magazine, the gang sent one of its members into a Barclay’s branch, posing as an IT guy to fix a computer problem.  While there, he installed a KVM switch linked to a router, which in turn was attached to a computer at the branch.  The installation allowed the gang to transfer money from the bank to other accounts under their control.  When they tried a similar heist at another London bank not six months later, they were caught.

The Long, Drawn-Out End of E-Mail as We Know It

J. Caron

Summary Bullets:

• E-mail has never been popular in business environments, so reports of its death are celebrated
• If e-mail is going to die, however, it will be long and slow, with new approaches requiring e-mail integration at the very least

Not long after e-mail went mainstream in late 1980s people started to complain about it. In fact, it was nearly instantaneous. At first there was a hint of pride embedded in complaints about the number of e-mails received – the eye-rolling moan about the “hundreds of e-mails each day” that really served to illustrate the complaining party’s indispensable magnificence.

Unusual Suspects Set to Move the Collaboration Space in 2012

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets

• The human-centricity of collaboration software invites innovation driven from many disparate industries and technologies.
• Natural interface design, information foraging techniques and game theory are set to change the collaboration landscape in 2012.

There are few certainties in this world. And yet, as if bound by a cosmological force greater than the pull of gravity itself, at this time every year, those of us in the technology industry feel an unshakable pull, an unrelenting need to prognosticate. I am in no way immune to such innate stipulations, so it is with great pleasure that I bring to you my own forecast for 2012’s enterprise collaboration platform marketplace. But, just to keep things interesting, what follows are the three most unusual yet profoundly influential trends I think we are likely to see play out this coming year.

Social Engineering – Industrialized Exploitation of Human Helpfulness

B. Ostergaard

Summary Bullets:

• Helpful people are the first targets
• Provide simple security commandments to follow under pain of dismissal

The most compelling briefings at this year’s RSA Security Conference in London were focused on how companies can make the journey from their governance, risk and compliance process and the resulting security policy to actually making it work throughout their enterprise, where getting people aligned with security is a real sticking point. It’s not that employees actually want to spill company secrets – mostly, they just want to be helpful to ‘perceived’ colleagues. How many times do we actually read error messages or listen to security warnings? How often do we reflect on the veracity of a caller who seems really nice and obviously knows a lot about the company?