Bruce Scheiner is covering an interesting security aspect of Web 2.0 over at his blog: identity theft scams. Though I believe a more apt category would be social engineering, because this vulnerability is not limited to solely ID theft. This demonstrates the need to be vigilant in deciding who to friend on these social networking sites. But not even that will protect you, because your friends or your friend’s friends may not be as security-conscious as you are, and that leaves a way in for the enterprising social engineer. I mean, I’ve been on facebook all of 2 weeks, and every day the site itself asks me to friend some person I don’t know. And how many of us have seen the profiles with 1000’s of friends? Come on, no one knows 1000’s of people well enough to actually consider them friends.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the functions of public relations is to obtain exposure for an organization through traditional media outlets such as TV, newspapers, and magazines. In fact, information disseminated from a company’s PR team or hired firm is becoming more and more important. The old stand-by media publications are shrinking: laying off reporters, consolidating beats, discontinuing print editions and even going bankrupt. Pew’s recent annual report on the state of the media said that newspapers were in a “free fall” during 2008. This means more and more of our 10 o’clock news stories and newspaper/magazine articles come from the one source that goes straight to the reporter: press releases. This is about security. This is about the quality of  the information being used in our news. This is about the press release not being a secure source of information.
Read the rest of this entry »