Scott Wright’s Security Views

One thing sailors usually learn before they become “old sailors” is the value of keeping things neat. When you are at the mercy of wind and water - and with nobody around - a good sailor makes recovery from incidents look easy. They know exactly where the lines, tools and emergency equipment are stowed. They also explain the safety features to new crew members and passengers before they are needed.

If you see ropes strewn across the deck, you may not think of them as being dangerous; but imagine having a weather or mechanical crisis going on, and having to keep looking down to see what’s under your feet as you scurry about the deck to keep from tripping and falling overboard.

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I felt a bit like one of the humans in Planet of the Apes (or the Simpsons’ version - Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off … click HERE) today when I saw the news about the breach of privacy by US State Department and/or passport office employees. They have apparently accessed passport records for Obama, Clinton and McCain over the past year or two. This is certainly a sensitive issue, and breaches like this should be detected and escalated quickly for response. It’s not clear to me how long it took for a proper response to occur in this instance, but once the media gets a hold of it, there will obviously be a lot of armchair quarterbacking going on.

The thing that bothers me, personally, is that a few of the reports I’ve seen were questioning why “contractors” were able to access this information, as opposed to having only full-time employees able to access such sensitive data. Continue Reading »

The idea may sound strange, at first. Nevertheless, the meaning is similar to the idea we have become familiar with when it comes to computer data. If you don’t do backups, you are at risk of losing something valuable. With people, it’s the same thing.

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