GTISC Emerging Cyber Threats Report

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

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]

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.

hmmmm

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.

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

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.