The mess we’re in with the security of data

In November the TalkTalk hack rumbled on, finishing up with the Parliamentary Culture Media and Sports committee launching an enquiry into cyber security in telecommunications.

The VoIP industry contributed to the enquiry through their trade body ITSPA. I wrote a think piece and others chipped in. Over at Tref.net you can find an extract I wrote on encryption – basically I think it’s not much use inside a private network, tell me if I’m wrong.

http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/30/is-encryption-the-answer-to-data-loss

Meanwhile, the utterly hopeless mess we’re in with individual security was in my face personally earlier this week when I tried to register to a minor government website:

“Your password must be between 9 and 16 characters long and contain a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and a special character (!,@,#,$,%,^,&,*).

For maximum security your Password should not:

• Have two repeating characters
• Include the user name as part of the Password
• Use dictionary/common words
• Use words/common phrases with substituted numbers for characters e.g. he110 for hello.

But above all make it easy to remember and keep it in a safe place. It must be changed every 90 days.”

That last, made me laugh out loud…

Have a good Christmas