A 19 year old man has been detained in UK by Scotland apparently in connection with the spate of cybercrimes against US Senate, CITI and the CIA. It is commonly acknowledged that hackers are technically sophisticated individuals who do what they do because of self-motivation and passion for technology. A 19 year old became technically savvy with 4-5 years of experience. Training hackers to reach this level of excellence is not at all difficult if the individual is properly motivated.

The key goal is to frustrate the development of hackers by raising the bar on technical excellence needed to crack into systems. This is a crucial requirement for a successful cloud-based interconnected world. Unfortunately this is not the case as recent incidents demonstrate that exploits were perpetuated through basic deficiencies in security measures on internet facing systems. Most of these deficiencies are not due to lack of security knowledge but through broken IT processes, security awa...

As cyberspace becomes a dominant form of global communications and trade, so does its political use. This is the first part of a multipart blog on the eight key political issues around internet security and privacy.

Corporate and Military Espionage: Countries accuse each other of hacking to retrieve economic, military or political secrets. Most notably is the ongoing war between US and China. China believes such accusation hurt its business interest and America believes it is loosing investment in research.

Political Whistleblowing: Sites such as WikiLeaks created an international diplomatic furore by publishing US diplomatic cables that are used by the political establishments of many countries in face-offs’ between governments and the opposition. Disclosures on these sites also cover companies such as Swiss Bank, etc and their secrecy laws. Governments claim that these cables violate national security, media takes them as truth and companies have tried to claim t...

One of the greatest myths that I have realized in the current world is that There is Security.

We are not talking about kids or novices on some other social networking web site or some site that offers free “cracks and cheat code” for various games, and the like. All that is “kid stuff”.

We are talking about a whole set of companies involved in defense contracts and also high tech organizations. Not only that, even governments which consider themselves as “advanced” including US, Canada, besides India, and also the UN are not safe from these attacks. And I believe some of these organizations and nations spend billions of dollars on security and to security experts.

What could be the danger? National secrets, including defense plans, budgets and others could be out in the open. These could help “terror” and other criminal elements to stay “one step ahead” in the game. Information about budget outlays of governments as well as companies, as well as various bus...