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Warchalking: should your company be worried?
posted on 18/09/2002

The CBI has damned ‘warchalking’ – the practice of marking street locations where business and private wireless networks can be accessed with a suitably equipped computer device – as an “implicit incitement to irresponsible and illegal acts”. Warchalkers say it is harmless and the potential use of warchalking for hacking is “highly overblown”. But what is the security risk, and should companies be worried? Nokia Internet Communications’ EMEA technical manager, Andrew Namboka, explains. If you spot a few weird-looking circular chalk marks on the pavement outside your building when walking into work tomorrow, you might want to have a quick chat to your IT department about upgrading network security. For those unfamiliar with warchalking, the basic concept is this: the signal from wireless networks being deployed by businesses can, in many cases, be strong enough to be received by computers outside an office building itself. So a person with a laptop or handheld computer configur... [more]

IT Security: the challenges of today and tomorrow
posted on 30/08/2002

Where do you start when securing your ebusiness systems? It would be wonderful to have a green field site and start from the beginning, but most of us have to start in the real world with the systems we have. Moreover, we have to secure our ebusiness systems in an environment where genuine, serious threats exist alongside the paranoia that fires up every time a hacker or virus inflicts major damage on someone. We have to keep up to date with technical advances when there is a shortage of skilled staff. We have to be able to distinguish what will genuinely help secure ebusiness systems from the abundance of security hype. In this article, I'll be looking at the issues surrounding some key risk areas for ebusiness systems such as extranets, VPNs, email and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. I'll be outlining the latest tools and management techniques available, and considering security issues for the future. I'll also be discussing where high availability and load bal... [more]

Digital video recording makes a big impact on reducing crime levels
posted on 28/08/2002

Within 6 months of installing the first digital video recorder at the Proudfoot supermarket in Withernsea the store’s crime rates were virtually eliminated. Now, two years on, the Proudfoot chain is planning to install digital video recorders throughout the other branches. Proudfoot is a supermarket chain of 6 stores, located in the north of England along the East Coast between Scarborough and Barton upon Humber. Drew Fussey, Security Manager, joined Proudfoot stores 3 years ago and is responsible for the security across all stores. His first task on joining the company was to improve the existing security system and reduce the levels of crime and loss suffered. With many years of experience in retail security, it didn’t take long before Fussey developed a new security strategy. He recalls how the CCTV system was ‘antiquated’. However, the managing director was ‘very keen’ on putting in new equipment and had just installed a new standard time-lapse VCR in the Eastfield, Scarborough, s... [more]

Lock up your Data - or you might go to jail
posted on 23/07/2002

Companies risk falling foul of the law if they fail to protect their clients’ personal data from prying eyes, under newly enforced provisions of the Data Protection Act. Jason Kent of data security specialists Open Seas looks at the issues facing SMEs in our increasingly data-dependent world. Losing a laptop in the back of a taxi could be more than an embarrassment, if its hard disk turns out to contain confidential information about clients. Under recently enforced provisions of the 1998 Data Protection Act, company directors can face prison if electronically held records fall into the wrong hands. The ease and speed with which information can now be captured, stored and transmitted has its downside. In the past, when a company’s confidential data was stored in printed form, industrial espionage and theft was a laborious, risky exercise. Getting hold of physical documents usually involved breaking into the premises, copying them was time-consuming and problematic. Today, when ... [more]

Iris recognition is ideal for high security applications
posted on 11/06/2002

“Yes, we’re all individuals,” shouts the crowd in unison in the Monty Python film, Life of Brian. And the really funny thing is, they were right. Despite uncanny resemblances, phenomena such as identical twins and high degrees of similarity, we humans possess enough characteristics that differ for us to be able to truly say that we are all unique individuals. But, how do we prove this? Or more importantly get a machine to recognise these differences? This us where the newly emerging field of biometric systems comes in. ‘Biometrics’ originally referred to the use of statistical and mathematical models applicable to data analysis problems in the biological sciences. Analysis of data from agricultural field experiments to compare the yields of different varieties of wheat, for example. More recently ‘biometrics’ has been used to refer to the automatic identification of an individual based on their physiological or biological traits and this is more likely to be the sense now understo... [more]

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