Fasten your seat-belts...

When IT & Security Worlds Collide (IFSEC Global)

[...C]onverged security marries physical, logical, and information security with risk management, business continuity, and disaster recovery on a common network enabled by IT on the IP network. As security professionals, whether we like it or not, this trend is not only here to stay but destined to grow...

Networked IT ID management in the real world

Passwords are the weak link in IT security (Computerworld)

Password security is the common cold of our technological age, a persistent problem that we can't seem to solve. The technologies that promised to reduce our dependence on passwords -- biometrics, smart cards, key fobs, tokens -- have all thus far fallen short in terms of cost, reliability or other attributes. And yet, as ongoing news reports about password breaches show, password management is now more important than ever.

All of which makes password management a nightmare for IT shops. "IT faces competing interests," says Forrester analyst Eve Maler. "They want to be compliant and secure, but they also want to be fast and expedient when it comes to synchronizing user accounts."

Is there a way out of this scenario? The answer, surprisingly, may be yes.

It goes on from there to cover several different solutions, including biometrics.

In a Cloud-Connected IT World, are Biometrics the Answer?

For your eyes only: New twist on Digital ID could keep you from getting hacked (ZDNet)

With so many individuals with multiple accounts on so many linked cloud services, it is inevitable that this sort of cybercrime is going to become more commonplace unless new mechanisms are put into place to prevent this form of compromise that Honan experienced.

One way of dealing with this would be to employ biometrics on all computing devices. I wrote about this at length in February 2011, which eventually led to an appearance on CBC Radio alongside prominent independent security researcher Dr. Markus Jakobsson.

Big Data's Impact in the World

Privacy advocates tend to latch onto biometrics as a convenient way of expressing concerns about a world driven by Big Data even though biometrics will only ever be a tiny slice of the data pie.

Big data does, however, present opportunities and challenges that are well worth considering. The opportunities are so great that big data techniques will, and probably should be, adopted. The challenges to individual privacy are real, too.

This article provides a great overview of what is becoming possible and where we may be headed.

The Age of Big Data (New York Times)

Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.

But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.

Those artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and ad business and its experimental robot cars, which have navigated thousands of miles of California roads, both use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tricks. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing vast quantities of data and making decisions instantaneously.

The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri, the talking, question-answering application in iPhones, which Apple introduced last fall. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010, and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, offering reminders, weather reports, restaurant suggestions and answers to an expanding universe of questions.

That's just a sample. It's well worth reading the whole thing.

The Fight to Secure the Current Internet is Unwinnable

The internet is used to do all kinds of things that no one, even its creators, could ever have envisioned so this article shouldn't be taken as an opportunity to have a go at the giants upon whose shoulders so many stand. Rather, it presents an opportunity to conduct a cost-benefit analysis on the evolutionary approach and the revolutionary approach — the current arms race between cops and robbers or hitting the reset button — to internet security and identity assurance.

 Internet Creators Acknowledge Security Overlooked in Original Web Framework (FT.com)

A faulty initial design – with net protocols that rely on trust and freely allow anonymity – has been compounded by the slow rollout of security gear, he says.

“I can do a very good job,” says Mr Eisen, whose company tries to keep pace with advancements in the cybercrime underworld. “But in the long run, it is essentially hopeless.”

So, what would a secure internet look like? Mr Eisen has set out plans for Internet 2 in a document called Project Phoenix. Included in his blueprint are biometric identification, encryption of all keystrokes and virtual machines created for every transaction.

h/t @TimeTrax_ET