Srcasm

So, while I was perusing the Wootable Awards for CES 2008 I happened upon an advertisement from WebEx.  It read just like the one to the right — oh wait, it was the one to the right.  I’m not sure about anyone else who works in security, IT, or for any company where company data is important but this is difficult to look at.  Don’t get me wrong, I think that WebEx makes a great product.  I’ve used it at my companies and I’ve used it to share data with clients.  I also understand that they are trying to pull in the guy who has no control over his network security and just wants to get his information out there but this is a scary thought for those of us who need to protect said data each and every day.

I know that most companies today have at least a simple firewall installed on their internet edge and some even have a DMZ where they put their email servers and web servers (not many it turns out).  But many companies don’t use any sort of content filtering or application level firewall that can help block unwanted things like sharing your precious information with the world and a $49/month WebEx account.

So please, make sure that you take 5 minutes today and take a look at what you allow to run inside your network.  No matter how strong your firewall is on the internet, it still can’t block the stupidity of people who run things that have the ability to “leap the internet securely, through any firewall.”

So, I know that all of your Mac users (blech!) might not be excited but I am. I finally went out and bought a web cam for my laptop. It’s a tiny Creative Live! Ultra for Notebooks camera and I have to say, so far I’m impressed. It comes with a few great features that I never thought I’d use (and I might still never touch).

First, the quality is fine for me. I wasn’t looking for an HD quality web cam (if they even make those yet) but I was looking for something that I could easily record content on Viddler, YouTube, etc and this one surely does that. It comes with a feature called “multi-person Smart Face-Tracking”. This is quite a feature. I was skeptical of how it would work at first but after trying it out a bit I see it could come in very handy. It tracks multiple people as they move about the room making sure to keep the people with faces in the picture (the ones without usually creep me out anyway). Continue reading »

I recently sat in a meeting to discuss our company’s laptop security practices. Now, we aren’t a publicly traded company but we should be protecting out data to the best of our abilities without impacting the user too much. There we many topics discussed in this meeting — everything from encryption of the HDs to using encrypted thumb drives to CMOS passwords/HD passwords via the CMOS. It was a fun time and explaining why certain processes would be helpful and others wouldn’t was quite a challenge.

I think we finally came to the realization that encrypting all of our hard drives was not going to be a viable option. The major issue we face is we have too many older laptops that do not offer hardware encryption on the drives. Software encryption is an option but in my experience it’s a slow and painful process that usually requires some work on the user’s end to make it function properly. Continue reading »