Employers should be informed of a known flu epidemic set to hit mid-week, which could significantly impact employee turn-out and/or performance.  (Link—>)

Great regarding a briefing the FBI gave on counterfeit Cisco equipment being sold to U.S. companies and government agencies.

Link—>

I am comprising this entire post using MacSpeech Dictate. I’m incredibly impressed at how well the speech recognition works. I’ve use the software already to send several e-mail messages and to converse with people on Instant Messenger.

This concludes this portion of our test.

So Chertoff is speaking at the RSA conference and we’re getting more play regarding a Cyber Manhattan Project.  This idea is anything but new.  In 1997, Winn Schwartau established a groundswell on the same issue but couldn’t secure adequate government support despite having pulled together some of the top minds in the industry.  Several years ago, Richard Clarke (while still at the White House) asked several of us to do the same thing again, resulting in the Cyberconflict Studies Association (which is not rolling in government grants for our important research).  It is hard to get excited over the words being thrown around again given the lack of support for other initiatives.

The federal government has launched a cyber security “Manhattan Project,” U.S. homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday, because online attacks can be a form of “devastating warfare”, and equivalent in damage to “physical destruction of the worst kind.”

Speaking to hundreds of security professionals at the RSA security conference, Chertoff cited last year’s denial-of-service attacks against Estonia, and hypothetical hack attacks on financial networks and air traffic control systems, as proof that a federal strategy was needed. [Link --->]

Some interesting factoids coming out of the hearings held last week on multiplayer games/virtual worlds like Second Life.  The most insightful (in my perspective) having to do with the amount of money that flows out of SL:

To prevent money laundering or financial crimes, Second Life polices the financial activity of its members, and scrutinizes any withdrawals over $10, Rosedale said.

“We believe that the degree of scrutiny that is created by [policing methods] is quite rich and the pattern recognition of non-standard behavior … is easy enough to spot,” according to Rosedale. (Link —>)

Rosedale also goes on to state that the average withdrawal from SL is $1.00 USD.  Yes, that decimal point is in the right place. Obviously, SL isn’t going to be that attractive to terrorist or money launderers until there is more noise to hide the signal in.  Also, I’d like to see some stats about the average current holdings of Second Life players.  Is the average in-game bank account balance $100 or $1,000.00.