Security Pie

If you are not familier with the name of Herve Falciani you should. In my opinion he is “serving” the security community is a similar way that kevin Mitnik (or others, pick your name) did.

Mr. Falciani is a former IT employee at the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA that, according to the bank and French authorities, “obtained” sensitive customer information and hand it to the tax authorities in France.  The data theft took some time until it was discovered and the bank was suffering some issues.

This is all history now…. The assets are up as HSBC Private Bank shrugs off data theft. The Bank also reported that it has spoken to almost all current clients that were affected by a data theft.

I’m sure that now, ANY bank is taking data protection and activity monitoring more seriously.  Having said that, I do not think for a second that the risk management and  security teams at the bank did not take such issues seriously. Working with different security teams for over a decade, I am sure that they were trying to do the right things for ever. Thanks to folks like Herve, the “risk” factor in data security risk management is more clear and security teams can spend what they need in order to improve security.

On a second thought, I’m sure that many security vendors and consultants also thank Mr. Falciani.

We get tons of spam comments in this blog. Whatever the reason, spammers keep trying. While our cloud-based anti spam system (Defensio) is doing well, we still get several comments that should be manually examined.

Defensio‘s blog spam web service aggressively and intelligently prevents comment and trackback spam from hitting your blog

There IS a limitation for a machine ability to analyze text and understand it. There are similar issues when humans (most of us) try to analyze political lingo.  Reading the Top 10 worst political speeches of all times, I thought that some of our spammer’s writers should be considering a career change. Take this post for example, it’s one of the “best” I have seen in a long time. I’m announcing it, STOD (Spam Of The Day):

To be honest, it seems that you completely seized the bona fide substance of the position circumferent. While many look to have escaped the important concept of it, when it was posited previous is unadulterated plus concise. I am not sounding out that I harmonise on all details; all the same, you managed to have minded me grounds to ponder numerous of the major premises that I reckoned that I guarded as unshakable opinions in that attentivenesses. said, and now for someone like myself to think a bit more on some of the major details. All together I would state it is clear that you have clearly stated what needed to be said.

A political writer must be woking with those guys…