High School Security Initiative
There are a number of interesting security initiatives right now. Most of them are technical but one which has drawn my attention is educational.
There is a major initiative underway in the Bay Area to create a High School security initiative and have this taught in every California High School, eventualy as a mandatory core unit. While there are many excellent sites on the net which target this age group the problem is that it is purely voluntary. The end result is they are ignored.
I joined this committee three months ago and we hope to present the finalized and proposed curriculum late October 2006 in Sacramento. Quite a number of interested parties have come together to form this committee; the FBI, McAfee, Visa, Dept of Consumer affairs of California and last week, we were joined by ZoneLabs. In addition to this a number of third level institutions have joined, as well as a few all-important teachers and high-school students, who will have to deliver and receive the information respectively. It is great to see these different groups work for a common altruistic purpose.
The curriculum will cover such topics as boundaries of acceptable behavior, crimes against the person, crimes against property etc. The curriculum will educate students about threats, identity theft, etc and what to do about them. It will also educate would be perpetrators about the potential repercussions and hopefully make them think twice before committing.
If you have strong feelings about this project, or opinions please either add a comment or send me an email.
Posted: September 11th, 2006 under Security.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from MR
Time: September 14, 2006, 4:55 pm
Excellent article: came across this review here
A good security primer
So what? - While we are on the topic of history, let me point to a good backgrounder on the SecurityProNews site. It’s put together by Ken Baylor of McAfee and he did a good job of presenting the case of why we are seeing more spyware and corporate data theft. He goes into a lot of detail on the still present 419/Nigerian attacks and breaks up attack vectors into “opportunistic” and “targeted” types. It’s an interesting way to break things down. He goes a bit into the hacker methodology and then discusses some best practices to protect yourself. This is a long piece and will take some time to get through, but if you are somewhat new to the business - this is a decent place to start. You’ll get a feel for where we’ve been, how the bad guys are coming after us, and what you can do about it.
http://www.securitypronews.com/news/securitynews/spn-45-20060911EvolutionoftheHackerThreat.html
Comment from Roger
Time: September 14, 2006, 5:03 pm
Changes in Threat Landscape
Since quite some time, I was talking about the changes in the Threat Landscape. I am pretty convinced that the probablity of having something like Blaster or Slammer again is decreasing. This is the good news. The bad news is that threats like targeted attacks are on the raise.
There is a pretty good article covering this: http://www.securitypronews.com/news/securitynews/spn-45-20060911EvolutionoftheHackerThreat.html
Roger
Write a comment