Latest Computer and PC Security News

An alarming number of employees are exposing their companies to internal sabotage and theft
posted on 27/07/2011

To help prevent one of the most challenging types of security breaches - "insider threats" - organizations need to fully understand "who has access to what" across their enterprises and put in place proper IT controls to ensure that access rights are appropriate. Conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of SailPoint, a survey of 3,484 employees in the United States, Great Britain and Australia found that an alarming number of employees are exposing their companies to internal sabotage and theft. SailPoint's Market Pulse Survey underscores this very real risk to organizations: 22% of US, 29% of Australian and almost half of British (48%) employees who have access to their employer's or client's private data, and who answered the question, indicated they would feel comfortable doing something with that data, regardless if that access was intentional or accidental. Further, 10% of American, 12% of Australian and 27% of British employees with access admitted they would forward elect... [more]

The Institute of Cancer Research unifies all security and policy controls for all computer users with Centrify Suite 2011
posted on 14/07/2011

The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) is Europe's leading cancer research centre and has been ranked as the UK's top academic research centre. From its founding in 1909 as a small research department of the Royal Marsden Hospital, the ICR has grown to become one of the world’s foremost independent cancer research organizations. When the ICR began migrating its server infrastructure from Novell Netware to Microsoft Windows Server, it triggered the need to move to Active Directory for all users – including for its then 300 Mac users. Macs have been used within the ICR for almost 20 years. Initially, certain DNA sequencing applications the ICR scientists required were available only on the Mac OS. Today, Macs are important to scientists because of their UNIX foundation – many pieces of bioinformatics software are UNIX-based only. The ICR has deployed its Centrify Suite 2011 solution to unify all security and policy controls for all computer users, including its growing Macintosh user p... [more]

Apple Mac now features native support for encrypted drives
posted on 01/07/2011

The upcoming Apple Mac OS Lion operating system will incorporate a number of useful security features. "The FileVault 2 feature is a very welcome addition to the new Mac operating system, especially with support for external USB and Firewire drives. This is really good news," said Andy Cordial, Origin's managing director. "The addition of an instant wipe facility is also to be welcomed. With large drives, the wiping of data - especially on a remote basis in the event of device loss - takes a finite period of time. By removing the encryption keys, the remote wipe is effectively as near-instant as you are going to get," he added. According to Cordial, ever since he and his team started banging the encrypted drive drum some three years ago, customers have welcomed the availability of well-priced full disk encryption technology. This has been the reason, he explained, why the kits - which provide PC users with all the essentials they need to upgrade a PC's existing drive to an encrypted u... [more]

SMBs are taking encryption and biometric-based access control seriously
posted on 28/06/2011

With sensitive data being held in mobile devices and with the increase in remote working, SMBs are taking encryption seriously. With the proliferation of mobile devices and increase in cases of lost 'laptops' etc., it comes as no surprise that a recent poll conducted by DigitalPersona has uncovered that disk encryption is an IT priority for SMBs. In addition, DigitalPersona also found that more than a third of businesses are interested in biometric-based access control, providing more flexibility and agility to access of data stored on the company network. As data protection mandates become stricter and high profile instances of data loss proliferate in the media, a new survey has found that two thirds of enterprises hold disk encryption to be an IT security priority. A poll of more than 360 attendees at Infosecurity Europe 2011 conducted by DigitalPersona found over two thirds (67 per cent) of respondents said that disk encryption is a priority. Benjamin Boulnois, EMEA Regiona... [more]

Refining the roadmap to the adoption of cloud computing
posted on 11/05/2011

In some cases, organisations are only using an average of between ten to fifteen per cent of their computing resources for much of the time. This is not cost-effective and in no other part of the business would a ten per cent usage be acceptable. In today’s business environment those that still have IT capacity able to cope with their organisation’s busiest day are over investing in infrastructure that the business is unlikely to fully use the majority of the time. When stepping into the boardroom to make the case for cloud computing CIOs now have a objective. By assessing the existing infrastructure and aligning it with the needs of the business they can dramatically reduce the need for high capital investments into new IT infrastructure of their own and instead include a cloud model into the infrastructure mix that can give impressive, but achievable, time, cost and efficiency savings. Assessing the need for the cloud Organisations run and operate a variety of applications with ea... [more]

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