Ever since Facebook opened up beyond the .edu community, it has experienced a meteoric rise to success with more than 400 million active users. When millennials complain about their parent’s being on Facebook, you know this thing is mainstream.

So, are people actually going to delete their Facebook accounts? Will the old adage “what goes up, must come down” ring true for Facebook? According to BusinessWeek, users are staying loyal. On a separate note, the ITAC editorial team has held a number of informal discussions with Facebook users as of late, and many are feeling sour. Their sentiment is that privacy is gone – and this is a scary thing.

Beyond sharing our personal data with third party web sites, friendships, job opportunities and even marriages have been wrecked due to highly private information being made public via Facebook.

While we are social beings, there is something to be said about having the freedom to be discrete. Too much information is exactly that too much information. Information can hurt when it falls into wrong hands.

Perhaps we should start a movement called “Privacy 2.0,” where we bring privacy back? Or at least, we can delete our Facebook accounts on May 31.

We hope you have a restful Memorial Day holiday weekend!

The 2010 Summit’s focus is on “Building a Layered and Integrated Defense Strategy.” During breakout sessions that followed, attendees exchanged information with industry experts, regulators and service providers on topics including encryption, mobile device security, malware, phishing, web browsing, vendor management practices and cloud computing.

FSTC President Paul Smocer served on a phishing prevention panel, telling attendees about BITS’ and FSTC’s joint email security work and answering questions on email authentication: preventing email abuse, protecting

Of course this is not a new revelation by any stretch of the imagination. But, judging from many of the discussions going on from the RSA show, we can safely conclude that we are deep in a cyber war. And, despite the vast number of vendors offering various solutions, we can’t seem to crack the code for keeping the bad guys at bay.

As pointed out to us by renowned industry analyst and Computerworld blogger Eric Ogren at the show, when someone turns on their television set, there is absolutely no risk of being hacked or becoming a victim of identity theft. It is a completely secure system – always has and will be. Unfortunately, in the cyber world, there are too many platforms, applications, and poor standards that don’t keep systems safe, creating the perfect storm for nefarious characters to cause damage.

It seems that the “wild west” days of the .dot com era has defined our approach to the digital age – meaning that innovations, VC funding and multiple competing solutions have created too many platforms with too many holes in them.

So, what do we do know? Go back to being a paper driven society? Time to break out the type writers and copy machines? No way. Technology has made us more productive, smarter and more beautiful (well, that may be a stretch). We just need to find away to make our digital lives more safe.

Data Security Breaches Often Triggered by Carelessness
Often the biggest threat to your practice and patient data is not an outside hacker or a snooping employee — it’s somebody’s forgetfulness. As technology becomes smaller and more portable, it becomes easier to lose. Surveys from a data protection solutions company in 2009 found that in a six-month period, 12,500 mobile devices were left in taxis, and 4,500 USB memory sticks were left in pockets of pants sent to dry cleaners. Most people — including those in the security business — are not protecting the data on their mobile devices. So if the device is lost, the data could be accessed. Check out the full American Medical News article here.

Data-Centric Security: Mix Technology, Process
As vendors, security industry pundits, politicians, and CISOs fire volleys back and forth over the best way to protect data, attackers are taking advantage of our confusion: The consensus among the infosec community is that 2009 was worse than 2008 in terms of data loss, and that’s saying something. Remember 2008? The year 285 million records were breached–a number exceeding all of the records exposed from 2004 through 2007? Respondents to our InformationWeek Analytics Data-Centric Security Survey know something needs to give–and they hope it’s not the gates holding back the marauding hordes. Check out the full InformationWeek article here.

State to Firms: Protect Data
Companies doing business in the Bay State have just a week to comply with stringent new state laws designed to safeguard the personal information of Massachusetts residents. Beginning March 1, the state will require any entity that stores or transmits residents’ personal information to encrypt the data when it’s stored on portable devices or transmitted via the Internet. The personal information is a combination of customers’ or employees’ names and their Social Security, bank account or credit card numbers. Read the full Boston Herald article here.

CNN’s “Shock Wave: You Were Warned”
This weekend, CNN ran a special called “We Were Warned: Cyber Shockwave,” which was based upon exclusive television access to a national security cyber “war game” scenario. The simulated event was developed by The Bipartisan Policy Center. Check out the first 15 minutes of this segment here:

Happy Monday!