E-Commerce Passwords - Data Breach Inevitable?

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:05:00 GMT

Just how confident are you that your e-commerce enterprise is secure?

Not very, at least according to a recent survey conducted by Lieberman Software. The research revealed that more than 70% of IT security professionals would not be willing to bet $100 of their own money that their companies will not suffer a data breach in the next six months.

The study also revealed that one-third of organizations do not have a policy making it compulsory to change default passwords when deploying new hardware, applications and network appliances to the corporate network.

"These figures highlight the fact that IT security professionals realize that most organizations are woefully unprotected against cyber attacks," said Philip Lieberman, President and CEO of Lieberman Software, commenting on the research.

The survey revealed that many in IT groups are not changing default passwords when deploying new systems - something which should be a standard practice as default privileged passwords are, in a sense, hidden backdoors onto systems that are deployed on a network. Anyone with malicious intent, according to Lieberman, can attempt to use default credentials to gain anonymous access to systems and applications throughout the enterprise.

"IT departments that do not have a solution in place to automatically detect, flag and change default privileged passwords on newly deployed systems are neglecting a very common security hole."

Are you a Chump, or a Chi.mp?

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

chi.mp has finally exited its private beta, and it's a pretty good service for the time you must spend to get a site up and running and the value it potentially can provide.

chi.mp is branding itself as a service for owning and managing your online identity. chi.mp, which stands for "Content Hub & Identity Management Platform," allows chi.mp site owners to "bring the many facets of their digital lives together in one place that belongs to them." A pretty lofty goal but after testing it out, its ease of use might make the solution a feasible, genuine reality.

Web pros are going to jump at this: chi.mp offers a free .mp domain name. After registering, owners get to access their website, which includes Open ID, profiles, an activity stream, a blog, photo albums and tools to import content and contacts from across the Web. chi.mp also includes a contact management system they are dubbing the Ultimate Black Book, a tiered privacy tool called Personas and the ability to publish and push content to other services, like Twitter and Facebook. Most importantly, ownership of content and contacts is not in question. It all belongs to the chi.mp site owner.

“Content and social graphs should belong to the people who created them,” said Gib Bintliff, founder and CEO of chi.mp. “chi.mp owners can import their stuff into one place, mix and mash it, control who sees what, publish it, push it, and they shouldn’t lose ownership or control of it. If they want to export it, why not? It’s theirs. This is a big part of chi.mp’s core values and is reflected in chi.mp’s Owners’ Bill of Rights.”

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'Net Features : identity management

E-Commerce Passwords - Data Breach Inevitable?

Are you a Chump, or a Chi.mp?