Let’s put it this way: social media and security don’t work together very well today. Marketing professionals who see social media as a vital communication channel view security as a nuisance, whereas Security pros view services like Facebook and Twitter as trivial pastimes that expose the business to enormous risk. The problem is, when it comes to social media, these two facets of the organization need to come to terms with each other – and this was clearly on display Tuesday when the Dow Jones briefly plummeted over 100 points due to false Tweets from AP’s hacked Twitter accounts that indicated President Obama had been injured by explosions at the White House.

This recent breach signifies two things: 1) the potentially damaging impact of social media is real and growing, and 2) companies today aren’t doing enough to mitigate the risks.

As social media becomes a legitimate source of news and information, the implications for inaccurate or inappropriate behavior continue to grow. Damaging or disparaging comments on Twitter (whether intended or not), can have a real impact on your business and the way customers view your company and brand. Companies need to do more to protect their organization from social media risk because:

Well, we just saw Samsung launch its latest ubergizmo with tons of interesting features, like pause video playback at the blink of the eye. However, there is an important hardware feature of the Samsung Galaxy S4 to note here: finally a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip is embedded in the device (something that Apple left out of the iPhone 5), making it useful for mobile payments, building access control, and lots of other security uses. Issuers, payment services providers and trusted services managers have long been dreaming of mobile phones with NFC chips: not having to send plastic credit cards with EMV chips (or magstripes in the US) but being able to personalize the credit card right on the phone reduces card management costs, improves end user  satisfaction. There is nothing new here. But here's where NFC finally in a mainstream mobile phone can revolutionize fraud management:

1) GPS verification. So if you use it to make a card present transaction by touching your phone NFC credit card to a PayPass or other proximity based credit card reader, the payment authorization platform can immediately know where you are, correlate it with the riskiness of the location (country) and use your location to build a risk score. 

2) More factors and better capabilities for payment authentication. Instead or in addition to asking for a PIN code for transaction authentication, the payment processor can contact your registered phone and - based on risk - can ask for a PIN code signature, or secondary authentication like facial recognition or biometric retina vein recognition to authorize a higher value transaction.

3) Linking the NFC chip to an eWallet. This will be easier than ever before. If the NFC chip is initialized to be a credit card, the eWallet application can check for the presence of it and maybe even use it in a card present transaction. 

In China, mobile commerce has become one of the top priorities for organizations in retail, hospitality, transportation and other services industries, given the dramatic growth of smartphone adoption and the exploding e-commerce spending. Alipay, the leading third-party online payment platform in China and sister company of the country’s largest C2C website Taobao.com, claims 60 million mobile payment users and estimates 10% of its 2012 transactions were from mobile devices.

In terms of mobile payment, mobile proximity payments and mobile remote commerce have gained momentum through early industry implementations and government support. Starting 2011, the variety of technologies and platforms available in the market has grown significantly.

Under such circumstance, many IT organizations are interested to understand more about the landscape of the mobile payment space. They are also seeking information about the multiple platforms that will be enabling them for their corporate mobile commerce strategies, especially considering that the mobile payment market landscape in China is dramatically different from other parts of the world.

Read more

With apologies to the late great President Ronald Reagan, "trust but verify" is outmoded advice when it comes to computer network security. So, why do so many information security professionals still think trusted and untrusted networks zones are still best practice? Most think that people are trusted or untrusted. The problem with that thinking is you never know who can or cannot be trusted. Remember wikileaks? It was an inside job.

The solution: Zero Trust - Verify Then Trust

Meet John Kindervag, Forrester Principal Analyst and a leading expert in network and information security. He says that firms must take a Zero Trust approach to network security that means "verify then trust". In this episode of Forrester TechnoPolitics, John describes the what, why, and how of the Zero Trust approach to network and information security.

Podcast: Zero Trust - Your Only Hope For A Secure Network (8 mins)