SPOT Can Find You Anywhere
It seems that there’s always some sort of disaster — natural or otherwise — being reported in the news. What if you needed to find a loved one or business associate in an emergency, and contact by mobile phone was impossible? What if you were the one in need of assistance? This concern has people turning to the SPOT Satellite Messenger. The SPOT messenger gives consumers a line of communication, independent of cellular coverage.
“All of us have heard the news stories of people getting lost, stranded or worse in the mountains or remote areas beyond the range of their cellular phones and we’ve all wondered what would we do if caught in those same dangerous or potentially life-threatening situations,” said Darren Bassel, director of Retail Marketing for SPOT Inc. “Now, with SPOT, you can send a message for help or tell family members or friends exactly where to find you using GPS accuracy. For anyone who works or plays anywhere regardless of cellular coverage, help is now only a push button away.”
SPOT Inc has assured Arab New that the product is fully functional in Saudi Arabia. In fact SPOT works around the world, including virtually all of the continental United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Australia, portions of South America, Northern Africa and Northeastern Asia, and hundreds or thousands of miles offshore of these areas. SPOT uses the GPS satellite system to determine a user’s location and the SPOT network to transmit that location and the user’s status. The SPOT network features satellite technology with a proven 99.4 percent reliability while processing over 6 million messages a month — the equivalent of 2.3 messages per second.
SPOT message and tracking functions enable users to send messages to friends or family based on varying levels of need. An “Ask for Help function sends a request for help to friends and family. The Check In function lets contacts know where you are and that you are Ok. Track Progress sends and saves your location and allows contacts to track your progress using Google Maps.
The SPOT device weighs just over seven ounces and is priced at $170.
SPOT uses AA size lithium batteries for complete portability and when powered on, has a standby battery life of approximately 12 months. SPOT floats and its rugged waterproof construction is engineered to withstand a wide variety of extreme environmental shock and temperature conditions. Services to enable SPOT’s functionality are purchased annually, separately from the device. For more information see www.findmespot.com.
Russia Becomes Largest Malware Producer
According to analysts at PC Tools, Russia has superseded the US and China as the world’s highest producer of spyware and viruses, with Russia now accounting for 27.89 percent of malware while China accounts for 26.52 percent and the US 9.98 percent. Even the closure of the Russian Business Network (RBN) in November last year has had little effect on reducing threats coming from Russia’s network. RBN had a history of enabling cybercrime and was purported to also host phishing sites and child pornography.
“The vacuum left by the RBN has been filled by other malware distributors,” said Sergei Shevchenko, Malware Research Analyst for PC Tools. “There are more viruses and spyware coming out of Russia now than ever before and the complexity of this malware is also increasing. The trend is to produce many variants and flood networks as quickly as possible. The perpetrators can then sit back and see what has landed and which machines will be compromised.”
Shevchenko said it is getting more difficult for security analysts to track malware created in Russia and the demise of RBN was not necessarily a good thing.
“Like many malware researchers we bemoaned the demise of RBN because at least when in existence we could monitor their activity,” he said. “Now we are seeing Russian malware hosting services being advertised for servers in Malaysia, China, Panama, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey and India with ‘shadow’ providers in the US making cyber-crime more complicated to track.”
Assigning Blame in the Societe Generale Loss
As investigators sort out whether rogue trader Jerome Kerviel acted alone as alleged or with the knowledge of Societe Generale senior officials as some have speculated, a debate is emerging in IT circles asking if the massive fraud owes more to the collapse of financial controls or to the controls that govern information technology systems and the data they house. The extent to which access control exposures may have played a part in the fraud is the subject of a new podcast.
“Avoiding a Billion Dollar Blind Spot: What Organizations Can Learn about Their Risk Posture from Identity and Access Data” offers constructive insight into the reported allegations in the Societe Generale fraud. The scheme is the latest and most damaging in a series of headline-grabbing incidents — many involving access control failures — that have escalated in frequency and impact in recent years. Hosts Scott Crawford, research director and practice manager in the Security and Risk Management Practice at Enterprise Management Associates and identity risk expert Mark McClain, CEO and founder of SailPoint Technologies, examine the serious questions such losses raise about the state of governance and risk management in the world’s largest enterprises.
“What’s becoming all too clear is that companies don’t have a sufficient understanding of where their risks are,” observed Crawford, an expert on IT risk management. “As the facts come to light on this case and companies begin to examine what they can learn from the incident, I think we’ll find that business controls remain vulnerable to subversion by users like Kerviel without an effective IT risk management strategy in place.”
Following an examination of the case, Crawford and McClain outline five basic issues and related exposures that can contribute to a control failure and offer practical guidance for preventing similar incidents.
“The tendency is to view this case as exceptional, and the lion’s share of press articles focus on whether Kerviel could have succeeded in circumventing financial and trading controls acting alone,” said McClain. “There’s an equally important story here to tell about IT risk controls that in our experience is all too common — it’s an instructive case for all companies that outlines the need for IT controls to supplement business controls and validates the importance of user identities as a point of IT control in the enterprise.”
Episode 8 of The Identity Intelligence Insider, “Avoiding a Billion Dollar Blind Spot: What Organizations Can Learn about Their Risk Posture from Identity and Access Data” is available at no charge from http://sailpoint.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=309182. To view and download a detailed graphical timeline that indicates where key events may have alerted Societe Generale to potential access and IT control exposures along the dangerous path Kerviel reportedly followed during his tenure, go to http://www.sailpoint.com/news/files/kerviel.pdf.
