Monday, January 26

Cybercrime's global reach affects us all

New York
It's hard to imagine a safer place than the International Conference on Cybersecurity, held earlier this month at Fordham University in New York City.
A New York Police Department mobile command post bus was parked outside; uniformed officers searched every bag of every participant; and serious-looking FBI agents sporting earpieces guarded the doors to the sessions. A hilarious side effect was that almost nobody tried to break the "no food or drinks" rule in the auditorium. Sneaking in a shot of joe just didn't seem worth tangling with a beefy Fed. I got stopped just because my conference badge had flipped around the wrong way.
Anyway, nobody needed coffee to stay awake, as speaker after speaker revealed new and frightening facts about the global reach of cybercrime.
This event marked the first such collaboration between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a university, driven by a growing awareness of the serious threats to business, military, and even personal computers in North America.
Shawn Henry, Assistant Director of the FBI's cyber division, said the U.S. government now considers cybercrime the most critical threat "after a weapon of mass destruction in one of our cities.
To emphasize this commitment, 22 federal departments and agencies have been told to work together on a comprehensive national cybersecurity initiative, some of whose details remain classified.
Sandra Sanar-Johnson, senior executive at the spooky U.S. National Security Agency, described cyberwarfare attacks against government and business computers in Estonia, and more recently in Georgia, as well as cyberfrauds such as a phishing scheme in Romania that just saw 40 people arrested. read the full article at http://www.businessedge.ca/article.cfm/newsID/19288.cfm

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