Security » Encryption

SLIDESHOW: CIO Blast from the Past - 60 years of cryptography

2009 marks 60 years since the advent of modern cryptography. In October 1949 Claude Shannon published a paper on the mathematical basis of cryptography and since then electronic communications has strived towards more security. Take a tour of the past six decades with CIO.

By Rodney Gedda | 18 September, 2009 15:07

Tags: cryptography, history

Your laptop data is not safe. So fix it.

The largest single type of security breach is the stolen or lost laptop, according to the Open Security Foundation, yet these computers are among the least protected of all IT assets. The costs of a data breach can be huge, including the loss of trade secrets, marketing plans, and other competitive information that could have long-term business damage, plus the immediate costs of having to notify people if their personal information was possibly at risk from the breach. Particularly in a recession, enterprise management can't afford to take these risks lightly.

By Mel Beckman | 20 January, 2009 08:55

Tags: encryption

20 crazy things people do to get Wi-Fi connections

In their quest to get Wi-Fi Internet connectivity, people have done some pretty desperate things over the years.

By Thomas Wailgum | 21 August, 2008 12:19

Tags: wi-fi

How CAPTCHA got trashed

CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work.

Rogue code could seriously skew US elections

The upcoming US presidential elections could be stolen by one person -- not Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain -- but by a rogue programmer writing code for one of the many electronic voting machines used, experts say.

Encryption key management worries loom

As long as IT managers encrypt data using only one vendor's products, the keys used to decrypt that data can be relatively easy to manage. But it will likely become much more complicated as more vendors build encryption into more and different types of storage devices, each with their own key management system, and as users need to move encrypted data among devices for disaster recovery, legal discovery or simply everyday business communications.