The InfoSec Blog

Les Bell, another ex-pat Brit who lives in Australia was discussing the importance of training and reinforcement in such matters as DR/BCP.  Les is also a pilot and so many of his analogies and examples have to do with piloting and aircraft.

Part of our discussion has a much wider scope. Read the rest of this entry »

In this article at TechRepublic, Tom Olzak tries to address the issue of insider threat by talking about why your employees might ‘go rogue’.  I think he completely misses the point by discussing the motivation for spies and convicted traitors. This is a different class of people from toss that commit financial fraud and take revenge on employers who they think have wronged them.

Lets be fair, how many of these characteristics would have applied to people like Nick Leason, Jerome Kerviel, the rogue traders such as Yasuo Hamanaka at Sumitomo Corporation of Japan in 1998 and John Rusnak at the Allied Irish Bank in 2002, Toshihide Iguchi at Daiwa Bank, John Rusnak was a former currency trader at Allfirst bank, Matt Piper of Morgan Stanley, Anthony Elgindy, Thom Calandra and Brian Hunter - never mind the rogue executives as WorldCom, Enron and Parmalat and many other corporate and accounting scandals that were motivated by greed.

The list on the blackboard in the cartoon doesn’t, I think, apply to the ‘rogue traders’. It applies only somewhat to the rogue executives but it does apply more comprehensively to the spies and traitors like Ames & Early.

However Donn Parker’s point that (many) white-collar criminals are led into crime by “intense personal problems” makes more sense and also applies to people such as Brian Molony at the CIBC. So I don’t think this is a very good article. Donn’s observation si more geenral and more useful than Tom’s.

More to the point, since Tom’s article fails to address issues such as senior management ignoring the business controls that are in place because the people concerned were making a profit (aka greed in high places) and because it doesn’t address the issue of having internal resources where staff can come to get advice about pressing personal problems, and finally because it doesn’t deal with the possible channels for ethics complaints and whistle-blowing, it fails to address its title; there is nothing here about prevention - only detection, and very limited form of detection at that.

http://news.hereisthecity.com/news/business_news/6786.cntns

Related articles by Zemanta

• The 20 biggest trading scams
• Bradford & Bingley: ‘Management failure’ added to problems, admits chairman

http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/10/internet-addiction-defined-in-china-entire-engadget-staff-now-o/

Is a “dependency” the same as an “addiction“?

Many businesses and business processes, to say nothing of Government, are now _dependent_ on the Internet. Its a key part of our economy, not just our lifestyle. The world could possibly give up cell-phones but I doubt it could give up the ‘Net and continue without a massive loss in
our standard of living.

I’m always a little concerned when a government does things “for our own good“.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Warning over techno addicts
• Children treated for cell phone addiciton
• Some Psychiatrists Addicted To Prescribing Internet Addiction
• Sending Too Many SMS Messages Means You Have a Mental Disorder [Weird News]
• Half of U.S. Mobile Phone Users Turn to Their Devices for Entertainment

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\117\story_7-11-2008_pg1_8

Only in Pakistan? Shame!

The penalty is limited to an offence that ‘causes death of any person’,
according to the ordinance that will be considered effective from
September 29.

And, thinking of the “for want of a nail” poem, how indirect does this causality have to be? OK, I can see zapping someone’s pacemaker, but how about this:

Suppose a ‘capture the flag’ context such as the one in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in late October,  exposed a flaw that allowed someone to hack a database and get a batch of credit card numbers and those were sold off and used, and it happened that one of the cards belong to someone who had their card refused at the gas station and ran out of gas and had to walk home and was attached and raped and killed … in another country. Read the rest of this entry »