Archives: January, 2015

Ever have your e-mail account stuffed with hundreds of anonymous messages of no apparent value? That may well have been what’s known as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. It’s distinct from a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDos), which could be much worse. It’s important to know about such things in these days of […]

Quarterly security drills are only now being started on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) system, eight years after legislative prompting occurred. The delay is questioned in a Government Security News post by Denise Rucker Krepp. Security priorities and preparedness need reviewing wherever security is at risk, and that’s practically anywhere.

The psychology of security is discussed in a Naked Security post, which raises the possibility that confident computer users are more at risk of virus attacks than wary, inexperienced users. “Fujitsu and Fujitsu Laboratories,” the post reports, “announced recently that, based on research with 2,000 of its own employees, Fujitsu has developed the ‘first technology’ […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has begun a new Web dialogue, “The National Conversation on Homeland Security Technology,” designed “to get people talking about how to innovate solutions for the Nation’s homeland security challenges.” Participants are invited to join in a dialogue primarily about five key areas of homeland security, from “Responder of the […]

Pay heed to your Internet passwords. You probably are, in the sense that you’re prompted to have passwords for lots of websites. But put a little ingenuity into them. The two most common passwords, advises Information Week’s Dark Reading blog, are “123456” and “Password,” and careless cues like those won’t protect your security for long. […]

This will cause you to grind your teeth: Spiegel Online reports on how previously top secret National Security Agency documents released by Edward Snowden show that, as Marshall McLuhan foresaw, there’s a “guerrilla information war” ahead, a “war on the Internet,” with “almost no international conventions or supervisory authorities for these D (digital) weapons” in […]

Here’s why security needs to be a discipline practiced diligently and continually: Homeland Security Watch notes that there “are over 1600 French citizens” under surveillance by the French police and other Western security agencies. Yet three of them erupted anyway in the attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Kosher market in Paris. […]

Security on a grand scale, like that of the planet itself, is worth thinking about occasionally. As in the matter of climate change. “Consensus is building across all sectors of American society” says Viewpoints, an American City & County blog, “that more must be done to protect our communities and our economy from the damaging […]

When the British wanted to respond to threatened violence in India, Nick Catrantzos notes on Homeland Security Watch, they studied it and, in six years, wiped out the threat. It’s time, he suggests, for similar study of radical Islamic terrorism. “We have little hope of winning a war,” Catrantzos notes, “if the only one who […]

Security is systematic. In a safety context, that’s the message behind a new Safety Management System (SMS) the Federal Aviation Administration has approved for use by U.S. commercial airlines, to be in place by 2018. Most U.S. airlines already have a similar approach in place, but “safety policy, safety risk management, safety assurance, and safety […]