Last night, I attended MORENet’s Security Symposium opening reception in Columbia, MO. Besides the good food and preview of the vendor’s information, I also got to chat with some of my peers from around the state. I found (and latched onto) the only other library representative from MO – the Hannibal library district – and formally met some of the MORENet folks who sign those very important security emails. I also managed to be sitting at the table that the keynote speaker, Lawrence Baldwin from MyNetWatchman, sat down at. MyNetWatchman is Internet security software that does more things than I can possibly mention in this post. The idea behind the software and service is interesting, though:
The primary issue in internet security is not that hackers troll the Internet, but rather that the Internet is chock full of insecure systems which are easily compromised, providing means for hackers to perform untraceable, indirect attacks. The only profound way to improve Internet security is to reduce the number compromised systems and minimize the amount of time that a system remains in a compromised state.
While doing the social chatting thing (I was telling him about my son’s love for WoW – without mentioning my own…) we began talking about MySpace security. Apparently, many MySpace users (make that many, many, many MySpace users) use a predictable pattern to their passwords that make them pretty easy to guess. I would guess that this extends to pretty much any password-driven site, not just MySpace. We also talked about computer users and their security awareness. While most (even hard-core geeks) don’t really understand safe Internet usage, more training in this area can’t hurt. Even casual computer users should understand the basic guidelines to surfing the ‘net and – more importantly – know when to ask someone if the email/site/IM message they are reading/surfing is legit.
Today is more of the security symposium – I’ll write about all the fun things I’m learning during the sessions later!
