Donald Trump speaks during introduction Governor Mike Pence as running for vice president at Hilton hotel Midtown ManhattanIt’s certainly been a wild, heated presidential race.  Information governance has remained at center stage, ever since President Obama’s successful 2008 rallying cry, “Data We Can Believe In.”  And the 2016 candidates have followed suit, with Bernie Sanders’ “What We Need is an Information Revolution,” Hilary Clinton’s “Information for America,” and Jeb Bush’s succinct slogan: “Data!”

But no candidate has tapped into the electorate’s visceral hopes and fears for information governance with more gusto than Donald Trump.  As election day nears, it’s time to take a closer look at Mr. Trump’s positions on managing information compliance, cost, risk, and value.

I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of data entering our computer systems, until our IT representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.

Continue Reading The politics of information governance

View of crowd covering earsBy now, you’ve surely heard about the hack of the Democratic National Committee that gathered thousands of email messages, the contents of which were exposed by WikiLeaks and ultimately caused Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign. But did you also know that only last fall, the DNC commissioned a two-month security risk assessment that yielded dozens of recommendations to improve the security of its network? The real story is what happened next.
Continue Reading Why people ignore security advice, and what to do about it

Retina ScanOK, “souls” is alliterative, but a bit over the top.  How about instead “selling our bodies for security,” such as our retinas, our fingerprints, or our faces?  Multifactor authentication is indeed a useful security access control, the combination of two or more of (1) something you know, (2) something you have, and (3) something you are.  Thus, requiring both a password or PIN (something you know) and also a token or certificate (something you have) should be more secure than merely requiring a password.

The problem is that as biometric authentication becomes more widespread, our immutable characteristics are in play, in a when not if world of data breaches.  Getting hacked can cause harm and embarrassment, but if biometric authentication becomes widespread, the post-breach “loss of face” will be literal … and also permanent.
Continue Reading Selling our souls for security