Love a Little Online Shopping? How’s Your Privacy Awareness?

I am a sucker for online shopping and my current obsession is with books. When you have Fishpond, Book Depository and Borders offering free delivery in addition to highly reduced prices, well – it’s a marriage made in heaven!

Now, every time I find a new shopping site, I have to register my details. And as I was entering my name into another site last night, it made me think about how many sites have my personal details.

This week is Privacy Awareness Week and what a great opportunity to ‘take-stock’ of how you are managing your privacy, particularly online.

When it comes to privacy, I think most of us feel we have it sorted. We ignore friend requests from strangers on Facebook and we have an array of clever passwords. So, why bother worrying much more about privacy. It’s all good, right?

Unfortunately – it isn’t quite that simple. Managing your privacy, particularly online, requires a little more work to make sure you are safe and protected from possible identity theft.

Here are a few quick tips that will help get your privacy sorted.

•     Make sure your passwords have at least 10 characters and use a combination of letters, numbers and symbols. Change them regularly and try not to use the same one across all your devices.
•     PLEASE refrain from visiting banking or credit card sites when using an unsecured wireless connection.
•     Beware of professional looking pop ups that may appear on your screen telling you to download software. These downloads may contain malware (aka nasty software) which could give you a virus or worst case, send your private information back to a cybercriminal!
•     I know everyone loves to ‘Check In’ on various social media applications but remember it can be risky. Not only may you be alerting the world to the fact your house is vacant but you are providing your location to any unwanted followers. Go retrospective! Consider doing the location based post after you’ve left that location.
•     Invest in a comprehensive security package that provides safe searching technology to steer you away from fake websites that try and collect your information.

If you have a spare moment, why not check out the Identity Theft tool (ID Theft) on the Privacy Awareness website and test yourself about how aware you are regarding the risk of ID theft. But make sure you study the tips above first – it might help you improve your score!

Till next time,

Alex

By Cybermum Australia

Security Considerations in Enabling Big Data – Snake in the Grass (Part 1)

Big Data holds a lot of promise – from the potential to change business models to the ability to rapidly refine services and goods that traditionally took years of industry speculation. But the utilization of Big Data isn’t just about mining data within your organization. It’s also about tying it to larger data stores and services. It’s about enhancing data at the point of transaction, through social media interactions, and through multiple other sources.  From a security perspective, I believe more connections must be allowed to flow into the organization. Field devices must feed in near real time to centralized data repositories, and analysts need access to it all.

The US government has also taken notice of Big Data’s big potential. The Obama Administration recently unveiled a Big Data Research and Development Initiative, which will see at least six government agencies making a large investment with the goal of “greatly improving the tools and techniques needed to access, organize and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data”. It takes experience to leverage this kind of analysis. For example, it’s the kind of activity that enables retailers like Target to determine the likelihood that any one shopper might be pregnant, simply by analyzing the purchasing trends of individuals through predictive analytics. Data has always been used to help hone in on business prospects and opportunities, but now this same phenomena is stretching beyond sales and marketing. Many other industries are looking at how they too can leverage larger and larger data sets.

Both the financial and large retail markets have experience in the data dilemma, but most have focused on their own data collected over time.  The Red Flags rule prompted earlier detection of identity fraud for financial institutions, while retailers continue to capture sensitive customer information by luring them with special offers and loyalty programs. Last years’ Epsilon email breach, which disclosed the email addresses and affiliated relationships with the marketing programs of several retailers and banking institutions, caused real concerns about targeted spear-phishing attacks that use this sensitive information. It’s not only businesses looking to profit from this analytic data, but also cybercriminals.

As more and more industries utilize their own data, they’re also expanding out, leveraging other sources to gain richer business insight. Whether the objective is to drive dynamic business decision, get in touch with customers, or predict situations to mitigate risk, there are bad guys out there that may want unauthorized access. Even though you may just be starting the process of gleaning information from big data, or as I like to think of it, ‘finding the needle in the haystack’, please consider the security and privacy issues. Businesses and organizations need to put the right security controls and monitoring in place to make Big Data successful – and not a liability.

For more information on the benefits and risks associated with Big Data, stay tuned here in the blog for Part 2 of this series, and be sure to follow us on Twitter at @McAfeeBusiness.

By Kim Singletary