Category: News

The recent recovery in the price of copper has once again made telecoms cables an attractive target for criminals who aim to sell them on the scrap market. It’s understood there is a direct correlation between the rate of telecoms cable theft and the market value of copper.

“It is believed a vehicle may have been used to pull it out of the ground and then the same or a waiting vehicle used to transport it,” a Sussex police spokeswoman said, reports The Argus. [Comment: They used to do a similar thing in developing countries using trains as they went past.]

The national telco plans to rip out and scrap much of the copper network itself. It is scheduled to install fibre optic cables – either all the way to premises or to as far as streetside cabinets – across 40 per cent of the country by 2012.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/30/bt_copper_theft/

“We see this as a bright spot in federal spending,” says John Slye, principal analyst at Input, which expects a compound annual growth rate of 8.1 percent for security from 2009 to 2014.

Input says the top 10 executive branch departments — the Office of the Secretary of Defense, U.S. Air Force, Homeland Security, Army, Navy, Department of Energy, Health and Human Services, Justice Department, Treasury Department, and Commerce Department — account for 65 percent of all federal IT spending.

“We’ve seen that with the identity and access management market that FISMA and HSPD12 created,” he says.

Input last year forecast a 7.7 percent compounded annual growth rate for federal security spending through 2013.

http://www.darkreading.com/securityservices/security/government/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220900236

According to Eric Domage, IDC EMEA program manager, European security products and strategies, the survey reveals that organisations believe the most significant impact of a security breach would come from the lack of control of its intellectual property (IP).

Campbell adds, “The challenge when protecting an organisation from internal attack is that traditional defences are designed to face outward, at the perimeter of a network, whereas the inside of the network remains relatively free of security controls.

“Besides, at the employee level, protection of data goes beyond technology in that it involves the human resources department and in turn, raises a range of new legal issues around areas such as monitoring and fair use”, explains Campbell, and points out that organisations tend to believe that it will add a layer of managerial and process complexity that they don’t want to confront.

It’s a technology-centric approach to managing the issue of protecting sensitive data, it’s an important strategic step forward.

http://www.prlog.org/10384661-user-errors-will-lead-to-data-leakage-worldwide-survey-on-it-security.html

In-Q-Tel, the investment firm established by the CIA to support U.S. intelligence agencies, has invested in Visible Technologies, a start-up that monitors social media content on the Web.

Visible Technologies’ software-as-a-service apps are used by companies to monitor and manage their brands by observing and analyzing public opinion on the Web in real-time. Visible Technologies’ TruCAST engine “casts a net on whatever the client wants to know more about,” said senior VP Blake Cahill. Visible Technologies has been focusing increasingly on the government sector, and it has done some work through the General Services Administration, according to Cahill.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/info-management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220900005

The CA Security Management business, which provides integrated identity and access management, security information management, and data loss prevention solutions, will be collaborating with TSCP to help partners accelerate adoption of standards designed to build a globally secure critical infrastructure.

As the newest TSCP Gold member, CA will actively participate in reference implementations of TSCP’s secure collaboration specifications and speed time to market for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions that are aligned with industry requirements. “Several of our customers and partners are represented in this program and we consider it a privilege to be working with them to fulfill the TSCP mission,” said Dave Hansen, corporate senior vice president and general manager for CA Security Management. “Our global A&D and government agency customers are involved in global mission-critical projects, and we understand the challenges for secure collaboration at that level.

CA will participate by providing technology expertise for world-class identity and access management, including Web access management, identity federation, single sign-on, user provisioning and more.

http://nasdaq-ca.blogspot.com/2009/10/transglobal-secure-collaboration_14.html

“Much of the legal work remains to be done and it is difficult to anticipate when these matters will come to a conclusion.”

Carr also admitted for the first time that since the Princeton, N.J.-based processing giant announced a breach of its systems, some of the payment processor’s clients have switched to competitors as a result of the breach.

“We have had some competitors telling merchants falsely that they would be fined $10,000 a day if they stay with Heartland.

More than $500,000 relates to a fine assessed by MasterCard against the sponsored banks in which the card company said Heartland failed to take appropriate action upon learning that a breach was suspected.

“Heartland believes that it responded appropriately to all the information that it learned regarding the possibility of a system breach and upon discovering the intrusion it took immediate and extraordinary action to address the intrusion,” Carr said. In addition, the company said it would implement end-to-end encryption when payment transaction data is sent from the merchant to the processor. Heartland is in discussions with some of the card brands to improve encryption, he said.

http://searchfinancialsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid185_gci1355922,00.html