Info Risk Today Podcast

Before negotiating a contract with a cloud computing vendor, organizations should ask plenty of questions about privacy and security, says consultant Chris Witt.

Bob Russo says the long-awaited PCI guidance on tokenization should provide merchants with a baseline for standardization and best practices, and serve as a roadmap for how tokenization can complement compliance with the PCI-DSS.

Eugene Spafford thinks America needs the cybersecurity equivalent of an agriculture extension service to help educate citizens on IT security.

When it comes to social media, organizations have to be vigilant and consistent with risk assessments that closely monitor and evaluate emerging threats, says Andrew Kennedy of BITS.

Yahoo's Justin Somaini believes his fellow CISOs in business and government do a good job keeping their bosses informed of proper information security practices, but could do better in educating the rank and file about them.

Ian Harper of Pentagon Federal Credit Union says financial institutions should continually review their risk management processes, a recommendation reinforced by the new FFIEC Authentication Guidance.

Federal officials should consider a major revamp of a proposal that would require healthcare organizations to provide patients with a report listing everyone who has electronically accessed their records, a former government official who helped draft the proposal says.

ISACA's Marc Vael says differences in cloud computing environments and cloud providers can pose security risks. But well thought-out contracts and risk-management plans can fill potential security gaps and ensure business continuity during outages and disasters.

No two fraud incidents may be exactly alike, but a fraud investigator's approach can still be very consistent and precise, says Jean-Francois Legault, a fraud investigations specialist with Deloitte and Touche.

Chris Olson of Fremont Bank says card skimming and the acceleration of ID theft prompted the bank to initiate a move from the mag-stripe to the chip.

Before entering a contract with a cloud computing company, organizations should consider three critical issues, says Feisal Nanji, executive director at the security consulting firm Techumen.

"We're continually testing our controls and the effectiveness of our controls. We do a lot of emerging-threats monitoring ... so we can react," says First Niagara's Joe Rogalski.

Scott Laliberte, managing director of Protiviti, wrote the book on penetration testing, and he has strong feelings about what organizations are doing right and wrong when assessing their information security risks today.

Dan Rode of the American Health Information Management Association describes why the group wants to see major revisions in a proposed federal rule requiring hospitals, clinics and others to give patients access reports listing everyone who's viewed their records.

Oregon Chief Information Security Officer Theresa Masse finds herself at the center of a state initiative to simplify compliance by agencies with Internal Revenue Service rules to safeguard taxpayer data.

There are significant hard and soft benefits for government agencies to gain by investing now in solutions built around Trustable Identities, says Mike Ozburn, principal of Booz Allen Hamilton.

It's the new conventional wisdom: all computer networks will be attacked. For Phyllis Schneck, that means organizations must be resilient, keeping computers functioning even when they're under assault.

Performing digital forensics in the cloud isn't necessarily a new discipline, says Rob Lee of SANS Institute. But the task definitely requires a whole new mindset and some new skills from investigators.

It is no longer enough for information security professionals to secure critical information. They also need to be asking about the legitimacy of where this information comes from, says John Colley, managing director of (ISC)2 in EMEA.

Dickie George of the National Security Agency has one word to describe the state of information security education today: "Spotty." And this state must improve if we hope to fill all the growing demand for security pros.