By Ian Kilpatrick, chairman Wick Hill Group, specialists in secure infrastructure solutions.   Woking, Surrey: 23rd July 09 - After the loss, in a pub car park, of a memory stick containing information said to give access to government tax and benefits records, Gordon Brown declared: “I think it’s important to recognise that we can’t promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings."[1]   The damning list of the Government’s failures to date includes the loss by HM Revenue and Customs of details on 25 million child benefit recipients in November 2007; the loss of details on 5,000 prison staff in 2007; the loss of unencrypted details on 21,000 patients at Colchester University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in June 2008; and the loss in January 2008 of 600,000 records on members and would be members of The Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Royal Air Force;   This is just a sample of the many incidents made public.

 Burlington, MA & Redwood Shores, CA, 22nd July, 2009 - The hacking of a Twitter senior executive's email account was the result of a complex series of events but, says Imperva, the data security specialist, was the end result of a combination of poor security practices and safeguards.

 "As expected, the modus operandi of the hacker that emailed the Twitter planning documents to TechCrunch has now been revealed, and it shows that it is possible for a hacker to retrieve an account password for a legitimate user's cloud-based email service," said Amichai Shulman, Imperva's chief technology officer.

"If you examine what actually happened, it's clear that the security system for retrieving an account password in the cloud needs to be every bit as rigorous as a customer calling, for example, their bank and identifying themselves over the phone," he added.

Rolling Meadows, IL, USA (20 July 2009)—Rolf von Roessing, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, retired partner and now senior external advisor at KPMG Germany, was elected international vice president of ISACA—a nonprofit association serving more than 86,000 IT governance, assurance and security professionals in 160 countries—at its International Conference in Los Angeles, CA, USA, today.

Founded in 1969, ISACA develops international standards for information systems auditing and control, provides education and training, and administers the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) and Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT) designations. Additionally, ISACA publishes COBIT—the internationally accepted framework for IT governance best practices—and Val IT, a tool set for unlocking the value of IT and managing IT-enabled business change.

Rolling Meadows, IL, USA (21 July 2009)—Ria Lucas, CISA, CGEIT, a manager with the Investment Management Group at Telstra Corporation Ltd., Australia, was elected international vice president of ISACA—a nonprofit association serving more than 86,000 IT governance, assurance and security professionals in 160 countries—at its International Conference in Los Angeles, CA, USA, today. Founded in 1969, ISACA develops international standards for information systems auditing and control, provides education and training, and administers the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) and Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT) designations. Additionally, ISACA publishes COBIT—the internationally accepted framework for IT governance best practices—and Val IT, a tool set for unlocking the value of IT and managing IT-enabled business change.