There You Go With Your Financial Performance Transparency

Truly amazing, and the inavitable consequence of communication retention in the financial sector, but I feel it's the magnitude that resulted in Enron's entire email communication achive that's seems available online right now.

"Search through more hundreds of thousands of email messages to and from 176 former Enron executives and employees from the power-trading operations in 2000-2002. For the first time, they are available to the public for free through the easy-to-use interface of the InBoxer Anti-Risk Appliance. Create a free account, and go to work. You can search for words, phrases, senders, recipients, and more."

The interesting part is how their ex-risk management provider is providing the data, in between fighting with the Monsters in Your Mailbox. Continue reading →

Fighting Internet's email junk through licensing

Just came across this story at Slashdot, interesting approach :



"China has introduced regulations that make it illegal to run an email server without a licence. The new rules, which came into force two weeks ago, mean that most companies running their own email servers in China are now breaking the law. The new email licensing clause is just a small part of a new anti-spam law formulated by China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII)."



While the commitment is a remarkable event given China's booming Internet population -- among the main reasons Google had to somehow enter China's search market and take market share from Baidu.com -- you don't need a mail server to disseminate spam and phishing attacks like it used to be in the old days. You need botnets, namely, going through CME's List, you would see how the majority of today's malware is loaded with build-in SMTP engine, even offline/in-transit/web email harvesting modules.



You can often find China on the top of every recently released spam/phishing/botnet trends summary, which doesn't mean Chinese Internet users are insecure -- just unaware. What you can do is educate the masses to secure the entire population, and stimulate the growth of the local security market that everyone is so desperately trying to tap into.


Moreover, I doubt you can regulate the type of Internet users still trying to freely access information, again with the wrong attitude in respect to security :



"..prohibiting use of email to discuss certain vaguely defined subjects related to 'network security' and ' information security', and also reiterate that emails which contain content contrary to existing laws must not be copied or forwarded. Wide-ranging laws of this nature have been used against political and religous dissenters in the past."



It's like legally justifying the country's censorship practices through introducing the law, whereas I feel "network security" and "information security" attacks outside the homeland get favored, compared to internal ones, don't you?



Forbidden fruits turn into dangerous desires on the majority of occasions, and you just can't control that, what's left to censor it.



Technorati tags:
Security, Malware, Spam, Phishing, China Continue reading →

Smoking emails

I just came across this, "Morgan Stanley offers $15M fine for e-mail violations" - from the article :





"US investment bank Morgan Stanley will offer a settlement to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), agreeing in principle to pay a $15 million fine for failing to preserve e-mail messages. The e-mail messages could have provided useful evidence in several cases brought against the company. In one case, resulting in a $1.58 billion judgement against the bank, a judge turned the burden of proof on Morgan Stanley after learning they had deleted e-mails related to the case. However, Morgan Stanley has not yet presented the offer to the SEC nor is there a guarantee the SEC will accept. The investment bank says it is fixing the problems that led to the erasure and is pleading for leniency."



He, He, He!





You see, the email archiving market is about to top $310M for 2005 according to the IDC, still one of the world's most powerful investment banks cannot seem to be able to comply with the requirements.




Lack of financial power - nope, lack of incentives - yep! The case reminds me of KPMG's tax shelters, McAfee's fine for accounting scam between 1998-2000, and the "Smoking Emails" Admissible In $1 Billion Enron-Related Chase Case".





Quit smoking emails, and take advantage of MailArchiva - Open Source Email Archiving and Compliance.





Techorati tags :
smoking gun, investment banking, compliance, mailarchiva Continue reading →