New CyberScope is another step in the right direction on federal security

This month the federal government launched a new online FISMA reporting application, CyberScope, based on the Justice Department’s Cyber Security Assessment and Management (CSAM) system, which was already offering FISMA reporting services to other agencies through…

Is de-identification of personal records possible?

Last month Harvard Magazine ran a fantastic article on privacy in the current era, focusing in particular on the work of researcher Latanya Sweeney, who has demonstrated a somewhat alarming ability take personal data that has…

Stiffer U.K. penalties coming for personal data misuse

The British Ministry of Justice recently published proposed new penalties for knowingly misusing personal data in violation of section 55 of the Data Protection Act. The proposals raise the maximum penalty to include jail time, in…

Early potential for national data breach regulation bears watching

Coming on the heels of numerous draft pieces of legislation from the U.S. Senate (including those from Sens. Carper, Snowe, and Rockefeller) is an announcement last week by New York Congresswoman Yvette Clarke that she hopes…

Security issues at NASA highlight challenges in control effectiveness

A report released this month by GAO on what it views as deficiencies in the information security program and security control effectiveness at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) serves to highlight once again the…

BCBSA data breach another lesson in policy enforcement

Recent news that the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) suffered the theft of an employee’s personal laptop that contained personal information on hundreds of thousands of physicians illustrates once again that it is not enough…

Need a little more verify to go with that trust

One notable aspect of the widely-reported launch of a Security Metrics Taskforce charged with coming up with new, outcome-based standards for measuring the effectiveness of federal agency information security efforts is a statement written by federal…