Datarisk Newsroom

The Quick Response codes we see on everything from movie posters to business cards are becoming the ubiquitous contact links of an entire new generation of mobile devices and the people who use them. Originally invented in Asia at the end of the last millennium (circa 1994 Japan, actually), these matrix or 2D (two-dimensional) barcodes

In the early 1920s, the Enigma machine was a portable encryption machine with rotor scramblers used for encoding and decoding confidential messages. Since German electrical engineer Arthur Scherbius (1878-1929) invented it at the end of World War I, it was progressively developed over the decades to use additional rotors that vastly increased the difficulty of

Ever wonder what the use of stealing millions of email addresses is? All those often downplayed, ‘low sensitivity’ data breaches have massive potential to create enough uncertainty for people to eventually call a 1-800 number, even it it means speaking to a passive-aggressive tech support professional. Expect scenarios like this to exploit the trust humans

I’m often surprised at the public’s disappointment with the realization that security processes are not directly analogous to the medical notion of immunization. In fact, single-shot protection does exist, and it serves to defuse individual threats with the simple application of patches, firewall filtering or other methods of protecting against individual attacks. What about millions

In 2013, Target was the subject of a massive data breach that leaked tens of millions of customers’ debit and credit card information. I was interviewed on the air about the event and hinted that I would have expected other chains to come forward. This was a straightforward skimming attack scaled to enormous proportions, but

People often confuse information protection with IT security. One of the reasons I resist the compartmentalization of my craft as an automated, software driven process is that as important as it is, IT security not only reduces the scope of my work by at least two-thirds, but it misses the point of what it means

What do you know about food security? Same here. Located in the permafrost of a remote Norwegian island, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault provides secure storage for a quarter billion seeds (source: Croptrust.org) from all over the world. The awesome reality is that these grains of life could one day serve to revitalize plant life

I’m not a fan of banner ads, browser pop-ups nor of what’s come to be called behavioural advertising. I find that such promotion largely falls into two categories. The kind that has nothing to do with what I’m interested in, and the kind that is surprisingly well targeted to my personal interests. Since the former

If you haven’t already received a call from a ‘Microsoft Windows Center’ insisting on helping you get rid of ‘lots of hacking file in your computer’, chances are that you will, and soon. This unfolds according to a pattern that has been in use for the past few years and begins with a long distance