Chinese talking cybersecurity means security is already lost

A longtime reader and good friend of mine sent me a link this week to a CNBC story about the loss of fingerprint records in the Office of Personnel Management hack I have written about before. It’s just one more nail in the coffin of a doltish bureaucracy that — you know I’m speaking the truth here — will probably result in those doltish bureaucrats getting even more power, even more data, and ultimately losing those data, too.

So the story says they lost the fingerprint records of 56 million people! Game over.

Remember how this story unfolded? There had been a hack and some records were compromised. Then there had been a hack and […]

By |September 25th, 2015|2015, Government, Privacy and Security|55 Comments
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Who is your IT outsourcing firm working for?

outsourcing-for-dummiesWhile the U.S. Government has been remarkably opaque about the recently discovered security breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), we know that personal information on at least 21.5 million present, former, and prospective federal employees was lost. The Feds claim Chinese hackers are at the bottom of it, which is disputed by the Chinese government. This, to me, raises a number of questions, especially about the possible role of IT outsourcing firms and implications for organizations beyond OPM. Does IT outsourcing make your data more vulnerable? Yes, I believe it does.

It’s easy to blame the Office of Personnel Management for its own troubles. Oversight was lax. The agency failed a security audit and […]

By |July 30th, 2015|2015, Government, Outsourcing, Privacy and Security, Uncategorized|127 Comments
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