Commenting on the furore surrounding the UK Government’s plans to require ISPs and telcos to store all available information on emails, texts, phone calls and web history, Varonis Systems says that the Government is clearly becoming aware of the incredible power of metadata.

David Gibson, director of strategy with the data governance specialist, says that the data the Government is hoping to tap – and allow access by law enforcement officials – is known as descriptive metadata. It is now technically realistic to capture and meaningfully analyse metadata despite the large volumes of raw data that will be generated by the 52.7 million or so UK citizens as they go about their digital world.

With less than a month to go before Infosecurity Europe 2012 – the annual IT security event with an unrivalled free education programme – the organisers of the show have confirmed the Keynote Theatre agenda for his year with a highly attractive line-up of presenters and informational sessions designed to more than meet the needs of today’s pressured security professionals and their managers.

 According to David Rowe, CISSP, member of the Infosecurity Europe Advisory Council and Head of Business Services for Reed Exhibitions, this year’s Keynote Theatre line-up has been assembled following extensive research with the information security end-user community, and will address the issues identified by them as being the key business challenges for the year ahead.

AlienVault has discovered a family of weaponised doc (MS-Office) files - in the wild - that are targeting the Apple Mac platform, which the company says is highly unusual given the low incidence of Apple Mac vulnerabilities.  See the Jaime Blasco blog at http://tinyurl.com/brhjobt

 According to Jaime Blasco, a researcher at AlienVault, the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions specialist, the fact that the weaponised attacks are already in the wild is of concern, as it means that regular Mac users - many of whom do not have the kind of IT security software on their machines that their Windows colleagues do - are vulnerable to infection and computer hijacking.

Berkshire (UK) and IJsselstein (Netherlands) - SecurEnvoy today confirmed that Motiv is not just selling its solutions, but is also using them. So impressed with its versatility, Motiv has implemented SecurAccess internally, replacing its own hardware tokens with SecurEnvoy’s SMS and soft tokens.  Motiv’s end-users now have the choice of either soft or tokenless authentication. While Motiv still includes the hardware  tokens within its portfolio, the Dutch reseller believes SecurEnvoy is a more intuitive alternative for its clients.

Two-factor authentication is an essential component of any security infrastructure, as Motiv’s Information Security Consultant Bart Verhaar explains, “I don’t think you can bypass two-factor, or even multi-factor authentication anymore - whether its certificates, biometric or even token solutions.