Strong Laws, Smart Tech Can Stop Abusive 'Data Reuse'
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It takes effort and intelligence to keep personal information out of the hands of people and governments bent on misusing the data.
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Sure, you need to protect yourself, but in doing so, you can reap tremendous business benefits by more active use of the data.
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Emerging technology uses a printer's fingerprint to trace and verify documents.
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Researchers aim to make file-sharing fairer by treating bandwidth like a currency.
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InfoWorld - Technologies aimed at bolstering enterprise data protection remain tough to manage, but companies can derive significant benefits if they utilize the tools with a pragmatic approach, said security industry experts.
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The pervasiveness of large files and even virtualization technology are driving data overload and forcing corporate IT leaders to find ways to centralize storage.
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(Source: Arsenal Digital)  Hackers, disgruntled and careless employees, equipment failure, broken pipes, fires, and natural disasters all pose threats to your data. Savvy IT and business managers have recognized that in order to deal with these challenges, they need to deploy a company-wide data protection infrastructure. Unfortunately, traditional data protection strategies that rely on tape backup are often too expensive and too difficult to manage in today's business environment where an increasing amount of data resides in branch offices and on employees' PCs and laptops. To help IT managers conquer their biggest data protection challenges, Arsenal Digital has released "Solving the Distributed Data Problem: The Rise of Remote Data Protection Services." This report discusses: - The changing corporate environment where more and more business-critical information is generated and stored outside of headquarters - The growing need to protect data for compliance, customer assurance, and business continuity reasons - The advantages of using an on-demand, distributed data protection service that automatically, reliably, and securely backs up off-site PCs and servers.
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(InfoWorld) - Jeff Jonas, the chief scientist and distinguished engineer at IBM Corp.'s entity analytic solutions group, has developed a means of sharing corporate data without revealing what that data contains. This technology, called anonymization, effectively "shreds" information, making it possible for companies to share information about their customers with governments or other companies without giving away any personal data. Over time, Jonas believes companies will increasingly use anonymization to defend their data, and corporate well-being, from competitors and identity thieves. Jonas recently sat down with IDG News Service in Singapore to discuss anonymization and how protecting customer privacy will make companies more competitive. IDG News Service: How does anonymization work? Jeff Jonas: Normally, somebody with data encrypts it, and then they transfer it. Then, the recipient decrypts the data to use it. But while it's in transit -- in flight -- it's encrypted. Cryptographers have invented math that allows you to shred something, and then unshred it: encrypt it, and then decrypt it. Part of cryptography is something else that creates digital signatures. Smart math people have invented algorithms that are called one-way hashes. It looks like encryption because you put in data and what comes out is not readable to humans. But there's no way to take what came out and take the math and run it backwards, and get the input value. That's why I use the example of a pig and a sausage. If I give you the sausage and the grinder, you can't go backwards and make a pig. I just took advantage of something that someone else has made, and I just used it in a slightly different way to get a new result. IDGNS: In effect, the process of anonymization creates digital signatures of information that can be compared against other signatures for possible matches. At the same time, the signatures cannot be used to recreate the original data. Jonas: Normally, I have data and you have data and we want to figure out what our data means together. But I don't want to give you mine and you don't want to give me yours. This is why information sharing will fail: everyone wants to be the recipient. Sometimes a government may pass a law that says I, as a company, have to give you my data. Maybe you have a watch list, and you don't want me to see it. That's how I ended up creating this. I was getting ready to take my kids on a cruise. I made the reservations and then saw in a newspaper that there was a threat against Port Canaveral, Florida, from terrorist scuba divers. I was thinking, "Oh no, I'm taking my kids on a cruise." The U.S. government has this really cool, big list of bad guys. They don't send it to the cruise line, and the cruise line has all these reservations, and they don't send it all to the government. You could take 10 bad guys, they could just sneak across the border, use their real names and get on the cruise ship. That was the tension point. All of the work I had done prior allows an organization to share data with itself. What happens if you want to share data across two organizations and only find things in common? How would you do that? IDGNS: In the past, you've noted that personal information will get more valuable over time. Where is the incentive for companies to make anonymization of data a common practice? Jonas: Well, this is my theory. The pressures to an organization, every time it makes a copy of its data and sends it someplace else, the risk of someone stealing it grows. It's now twice as hard to protect, because you've just made a copy. You think its hard to protect this copy, but now you have two copies. Then you make another copy and send it to a database-marketing company -- now there are three copies. That creates real stress for an enterprise that's trying to manage their data. IDGNS: The incentive for companies to use anonymization then becomes protection of its own resources, rather than defending the privacy of customers? Jonas: Right. Corporations spend more time trying to be competitive than protecting privacy. If they spent all their time protecting privacy, they couldn't become more competitive. They would become nonexistent. I spend 40 percent of my time now working on privacy and civil liberties. You're right on the crux of this point: how do you create things that companies want to deploy, that make them more competitive and are good for privacy at the same time? Consumers traded privacy left and right, for convenience. IDGNS: And there's no way to get it back at this point. Jonas: Yeah. The toothpaste is out of the tube. Companies don't just say they want to spend money on privacy. They don't and I don't see that as a trend. You have to create something that can make them more competitive. Corporations are very risk averse. The notion of losing all their customer data, either to a competitor or identity thieves, and then having to make a public announcement that they lost all of their banking data, or all of their medical data, it can destroy their entire brand. If you can show them how to be more competitive, and at the same time reduce their risk exposure, then you are taking them on a journey, like in the case of anonymization, that is more responsible than not. It's a very new thing to be able to analyze data after it's been shredded. I am trying to teach the technique and I've heard other companies have announced they're going to create products like that, which is really good. There's a growing number of people using anonymization, and I think the wave is coming.
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Soon on sale: hardware and software from a start-up whose software with a new approach for protecting data by dispersing it across several servers--and maybe even continents.
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Unprecedented amounts of data will need to be secured in new, untested ways. What's the best course to pursue in such uncharted territory?
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A proposed law would require companies to keep detailed data about peopleâs Internet and phone use.
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Users are finding lots of inventive ways to lose precious files, say data recovery experts.
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By Peter Healy, The Stamford Advocate, Conn.  Dec. 17--Imagine that you just told a friend via e-mail about your idea for a new product that might outsell the iPod. But if a computer hacker finds it and steals your secrets, a lifetime of work and billions in revenues could be lost.
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Storage analytics tools provide managers the facts they need to support what might otherwise be viewed as a risky technical recommendation.
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The Fair Use Act would free honest consumers to pick the electronic locks on their digital media, under certain circumstances. A congressman says it's a good first step.  Luke O'Brien reports from Washington.
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As important as a physical supply chain Readers may recall that I wrote last year about Silver Creek SystemsÂ®. At that time I extolled its capabilities for product data quality (matching, cleansing and classification) through the use of semantically-based content profiling and attribute identification. This is particularly relevant when information comes into the organization in unstructured formats as most conventional data quality tools have historically been limited to support for structured information.â¦
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Until earlier this week, some electronics companies were wielding the Digital Millenium Copyright Act -- a law that tries to curtail piracy of music and movies -- as a shield to protect their businesses from competition.