Leon Erlanger is a freelance writer, consultant, and former PC Magazine Executive Editor who has spent the past eight years writing about security, storage, and unified communications for InfoWorld, Smart Enterprise, PC Magazine, and many other online and print publications. Leon lives in New York City with his wife and twin daughters.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the risks and benefits of personal mobile devices in the workplace, a trend called BYOD (bring your own device). The dangers of combining personal and corporate applications and information on a single connected device are well known. However, a less discussed byproduct of mobility and personal devices Read more…
Tags: byod, cloud security, Data Loss Prevention, DLP, MDM, Mobile Device Management, mobile security
The destruction Superstorm Sandy wreaked on the infrastructure of the U.S.’s most populous metropolitan area has brought the threat of cybersecurity attacks on industrial control systems to the fore. Two days after the storm, Department of Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano warned that “If you think that a critical systems attack that takes down a Read more…
Tags: critical infrastructure, Cyberattack, SCADA
The past month has seen two interesting developments related to scare- and ransomware. The first was a judgment of $163 million, at the request of the FTC, on the final defendant perpetrator of a massive scareware scheme that used Web ads and phony virus scans to trick users into purchasing phony antivirus software. The second Read more…
Tags: McAfee Labs, Q2 Threats Report, Ransomware, scareware
Many of today’s targeted attacks, advanced persistent threats and other devastating intrusions exploit the weakest link in the enterprise network—users. Amazingly, these users are often very sophisticated in terms of security, yet they often fall for simple tricks such as attachments in generic looking emails or phone calls asking them to divulge their login information. Read more…
One of the biggest conceptual barriers to enterprise public cloud use is mulitenancy. It’s difficult enough for IT to give up control of the infrastructure to a cloud provider, but the thought of sharing physical servers and storage with other organizations is a big stumbling block for enterprises considering running sensitive applications or storing sensitive Read more…
Tags: cloud, multitenancy, SaaS
Network and mobile data breaches get much of the publicity today, but there’s another less publicized avenue susceptible to both insider and outsider attacks: backup. In early April, for example, Emory Healthcare in Atlanta lost the personal information of 315,000 patients when it discovered that 10 backup discs were missing. Threats to backups come from Read more…
Tags: Backup Security, best practices
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media platforms are invaluable tools for 21st century enterprise collaboration and marketing, but they introduce multiple security hazards that organizations struggle to address. Dangers include confidential data leakage, reputational damage, social engineering opportunities for hackers, malware, and lawsuits stemming from inappropriate use by employees who see social media as Read more…
Tags: best practices, social media
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has updated its Computer Security Incident Handling Guide to take into account the increasingly dire state of cyber security. As anyone who has followed the rush of high-profile incursions over the past year knows, it’s looking less and less possible to prevent the inevitable attack, no matter Read more…
Tags: Incident Response, NIST
It’s a sobering experience to read the Security and Defense Agenda’s (SDA) just-released report, Cybersecurity: The Vexed Question of Global Rules. The report, sponsored by McAfee, culls together interviews with 80 cyber-security experts in government, business, international organizations, and academia with a survey of 250 senior security practitioners, to get a handle on the cybersecurity Read more…
Tags: cybersecurity, Global Cybersecurity, Security and Defense Agenda
For anyone who has spent the past 10 years thinking IT security is all about operating systems, software, and the Internet, it’s a little shocking to read McAfee’s IT Security predictions for 2012. McAfee doesn’t spend a lot of text discussing new threats to the usual suspects. Instead, it zooms into the next frontier, where Read more…
Posts by Leon Erlanger