Small businesses learn of growing cyber threat

http://www.conntact.com/mainstreet/11542-op-ed-the-hidden-threat-thats-too-big-for-small-business-to-ignore.html

GTISC Emerging Cyber Threats Report

HP Survey of Executive perception of security

 

Research Reveals Comprehensive Enterprise Risk Management is Critical Security ranked as top business priority for 2012 see http://www.arcsight.com/collateral/whitepapers/2011_Cost_of_Cyber_Crime_Study_August.pdf and http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2011/risk2011/NA_Risk_Survey.pdf

Pedagogy and Web 2.0

Paul found an article of interest

Found my old radio userland blog

It is http://radio-weblogs.com/0113212/.

Need the blogroll for some education links… wow — blast from past.

Connectivism – do we need a new theory of learning

The author, George Siemens, writes an essay supporting a new theory of learning – which he calls “connectivism”:

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.

Need to reflect on this – I see elements that remind me of Dewey’s Pedagogy – indicating this theory is not so “new”.

[H/T to Howard Rheingold - http://twitter.com/#!/hrheingold]

STEM funding – ROI?

From WP, an article on capital deficits – Worthy of further research :

One common refrain of employers is that we don’t graduate enough science and engineering majors. When he served on the president’s fiscal commission, Dave Cote, chief executive of Honeywell, made this a big theme. Working with Sen. Tom Coburn and Stern, he identified 110 programs meant to increase the number of science and engineering graduates – but no data on whether they were working.

Dr. Wicked and writing

My friend Jess suggested a site to motivate my writing… while trying to avoid procrastinating – -I did check out the site — and wrote 250 words in 20 mins trying it out..

hmmmm

Governance, complexity, and individual rights

It’s getting more complicated to defend your rights.  Corporations and well-funded entities are better prepared, have access to greater resources (e.g. talent, information, data processing capabilities) and can easily cause the individual to lose rights, property and protection even when truth is on that individual’s side.  Are we tipping the scales to a republic of corporatist interests?

The foreclosure process in Florida is an example where well-funded banks force the process to default in their favor.

As state courts receive less funding, judges and clerks face both institutional and budget constraints as greater numbers of individuals attempt to represent themselves in civil (and criminal) matters.  The outcome is not in the favor of those individuals.

research question

Do a careful read of this article in the NYT.  I’ve been thinking of the interaction between users and the technicians responsible for security as an area that one might investigate for signs of institutional intransigence regarding changes in behavior related to security outcomes.  Perhaps the user community is more attune to their security needs than the service technicians responsible for providing security.   And, then, perhaps not.  Can you have users tuned into security issues interact with security teams and still not have a more secure environment than the combination of ignorant users and not so knowledgeable security teams?

After investigating password requirements in a variety of settings, Mr. Herley is critical not of users but of system administrators who aren’t paying enough attention to the inconvenience of making people comply with arcane rules. “It is not users who need to be better educated on the risks of various attacks, but the security community,” he said at a meeting of security professionals, the New Security Paradigms Workshop, at Queen’s College in Oxford, England. “Security advice simply offers a bad cost-benefit tradeoff to users.”

Essay a must read

13 mm id’s breached and counting

McAfee Security Blog says:

NetworkWorld reports that businesses suffered the most breaches, making up 35% of the total. Medical and healthcare services accounted for 29.1% of breaches. The government and military made up 16.2% of breaches. Banking, credit, and financial services experienced 10.5% of breaches, and 9.2% of breaches occurred in educational institutes.

And the hits keep coming!  But, despite regulations requiring those data custodians to set up credit monitoring, the burden remains the individual’s to seek protection:

In many cases, if (and that’s a big “if”) a company finds out their records have been compromised, they might provide credit monitoring of some kind. Credit monitoring is definitely something you should take advantage of. However, I wouldn’t wait for your information to be hacked and a letter to come in the mail before you take responsibility for protecting yourself

The post credits the Identity Theft Resource Center for the statistics.

The ITRC provides victim and consumer support as well as public education. The ITRC also advises governmental agencies, legislators, law enforcement, and businesses about the evolving and growing problem of identity theft.