Developers have the objective of building a functional application. They are focused on building more functionality into applications. Moreover, building security creates more workload  for Developers which is a disincentive and moreover, Developers are rewarded for building more functionality than building more security. I have never seen a Developer in my professional life for being rewarded for building a secure application.

Hackers are focused on how to break the application. They look for weak links in application that will enable them to access application data. Developers usually follow process to build application, but Hackers have no process and all they have is multitude of possibilities. Hackers are innovative in trying various permutations in compromising the application.

A million dollar question is whether we can build secure applications when a Developer is focused on functionality but not on breaking the application?

There is a school of thought about Inside-out security where the application is built securely from scratch. Unfortunately,  this approach won't suffice because hackers traverse Outside-in. A little reflection will highlight the importance of vulnerability scanning and penetration testing of application. This will bring the perspective of what developers do not know already.

Building a secure application inside out is not enough. In order to address unknown unknowns (or blind spots of developers), penetration testing should be done. Both whitebox style penetration testing (where components of an application is known)  and also blackbox style penetration testing which mi micks an Hacker who may not have any knowledge of the application, should be carried out.

An application of higher level of security is not built just by Developers. It is built by integrative process of Developer mindset and Hacker mindset.  This is a constant struggle for years to come.
 

One of the main problems in counterterrorism today is that there are so many people and vehicles, and so much data and material, moving through globalization's myriad networks that it seems virtually impossible to track it all effectively. Nowhere has this problem been more acute than on the high seas.

In 2006, Adm. Harry Ulrich, then U.S. commander of NATO Naval Forces Europe, decided to do something about it. Despite having virtually no resources, his dream was to transpose the global air-traffic control system onto sea traffic.

Worldwide, aircraft are transparent, because they're all required to carry an identification beacon that allows them to be tracked leaving and entering airports, and monitored between airports, by a global network of sensors. Act suspiciously and somebody's fighter aircraft will soon be on your tail.

No such pervasive system currently exists globally for maritime traffic. While bigger ships carry an ID beacon similar to aircraft, without a shared monitoring network, that's like tracking only selected commercial jets and giving everyone else a pass.
So Ulrich, upon taking command, asked a simple question: "If we can do that in the air, why can't we do it on the sea?" He made a point of pioneering his sea-traffic-control effort first inside the Mediterranean, where NATO's southern naval forces have historically been concentrated, but his real target was waters off Africa -- the most ungoverned maritime space in the world.

Ulrich knew the U. S. Navy couldn't do it alone, much less bring Africa's meager coast-guard-like navies up to snuff so they could do it on their own. So he quickly created a network of assets -- both public and private -- to manage that space, modeling his monitoring system on international air-traffic control.

Ulrich began stitching together a network of shore-based sensors ringing the Mediterranean. His naval command then began initial monitoring by tapping into the International Maritime Organization's existing Automated Identification System, transforming NATO's ability to track ship traffic in the Med.

Almost overnight, NATO went from tracking dozens of ships on the Mediterranean to thousands, and instead of getting the data sometimes up to 72 hours late, now the contacts were being tracked in one to five minutes -- to an accuracy within 50 feet on the earth's surface.

When the classic big-firm systems integrators told Ulrich it would be too costly to pull it off, the admiral turned to the Volpe Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a U.S. Department of Transportation research center. Instead of hundreds of millions of dollars, Ulrich's initial network cost $900,000. The shore-based receivers are small, roughly the size of a radar dish you might find on a pleasure craft.

The strength of the system is a function of its reach: the more countries join, the larger the shared operational picture. By the time Ulrich retired at the end of 2007, he had enlisted 32 countries throughout the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, along the west coast of Africa, around the Black Sea, and in the Pacific. Today, the network continues to spread around the planet.

With Ulrich's system in place, local police, coast guards, and border patrols catch most bad guys, obviating American military responses. As Harry told me for an article I wrote about his work in a fall 2007 issue of Esquire, "I don't do defense; I do security. When you talk defense, you talk containment and mutually assured destruction. When you talk security, you talk collaboration and networking. This is the future."

The admiral's legacy program, the Maritime Safety and Security Information System, earned the Volpe Center a prestigious "Innovations in American Government" award this month from Harvard University's Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

In a presentation late last week at the Director of National Intelligence Open Source Conference in Washington, Dr. Dwight Toavs, a professor at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University, gave a bit of a primer on virtual worlds to an audience largely ignorant about what happens in these online spaces. Then he launched into a scenario, to demonstrate how a meatspace plot might be hidden by in-game chatter.

In it, two World of Warcraft players discuss a raid on the "White Keep" inside the "Stonetalon Mountains." The major objective is to set off a "Dragon Fire spell" inside, and make off with "110 Gold and 234 Silver" in treasure. "No one will dance there for a hundred years after this spell is cast," one player, "war_monger," crows.

Except, in this case, the White Keep is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "Dragon Fire" is an unconventional weapon. And "110 Gold and 234 Silver" tells the plotters how to align the game's map with one of Washington, D.C.

I don't know why he thinks that the terrorists will use World of Warcraft and not some other online world. Or Facebook. Or Usenet. Or a chat room. Or e-mail. Or the telephone. I don't even know why the particular form of communication is in any way important.

The article ends with this nice paragraph:

Steven Aftergood, the Federation of the American Scientists analyst who's been following the intelligence community for years, wonders how realistic these sorts of scenarios are, really. "This concern is out there. But it has to be viewed in context. It's the job of intelligence agencies to anticipate threats and counter them. With that orientation, they're always going to give more weight to a particular scenario than an objective analysis would allow," he tells Danger Room. "Could terrorists use Second Life? Sure, they can use anything. But is it a significant augmentation? That's not obvious. It's a scenario that an intelligence officer is duty-bound to consider. That's all."

My guess is still that some clever Pentagon researchers have figured out how to play World of Warcraft on the job, and they're not giving that perk up anytime soon.

• Moderator: Nick Hoover, Senior Editor, InformationWeek
• Speaker - Anne Berkowitch, Co-Founder & CEO, SelectMinds
• Speaker - J.B. Holston, CEO and President, NewsGator
• Speaker - Umberto Milletti, CEO, InsideView

Businesses can take advantage of social networks by finding innovative ways to reach out to people. Looking at who you know and how you know them can benefit you. Knowing a personal connection to someone that you are trying to contact (for sales) is helpful. The blurring between home, personal, and business life is making this information more available and better able to leverage. People are able to capture more valuable long term information from social networks.

A lot of social network applications can be taken from the talent management space. Deploying alumni networks as a talent source is also a great asset. Alumni represent a well-known and relevant population. This provides a great economic benefit from a social network.

If you are running a sales organization and looking at building a pipeline of leads, consider how these leads are relevant. The ability to get more leads is apparent in finding the right person, right connection, and right contact. Underlying everything are productivity and efficiency. How much time are sales reps spending researching and pursuing each opportunity? With information on social networks, the time can be greatly decreased. Knowledge sharing is something that can be actively measured.

The ROI varies with the business issue that’s trying to be addressed by a particular network. Recruiting for example has a very concrete, measurable ROI. Knowledge share gets a little more tricky. How do you measure how much is shared and the impact on business systems? Businesses need to determine what specific goal they are trying to address.

CFOs want to see ROI, not intuitive information. If you can demonstrate engagement and participation in these networks and knowledge sharing tools, more and more executives are getting comfortable seeing how it’s used at a qualitative and process level. It’s a very case by case basis.

One major crisis that we see in our customers is the competition between sales and marketing. Each wants to do their own thing, they go together like oil and water. However, the push of the economy is now forcing them work together. This is a great opportunity for IT to step in and help them collaborate and be more productive.

Other resistance from companies are how to manage what they are trying to accomplish while still giving employees free reign of sites like Facebook. What are the incentives for using these technologies? How does it fit into your company culture and productivity scale? You must bring meaning to the structure of engaging in social networks.

Social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook would not exist if people did not contribute information to them. However, if people don’t know that it is there, it does not exist. People need to see the value and get drawn in to engage. There are two ways that companies get into social networks. Tie it into the business process. The general idea of social networks are intuitive and easy to understand, which make it an easier case to present to chief executives. Make it clear - how do you go about it and what’s the value?

Social networks are intrinsically about extending the network, the more contacts you have, the more to choose from when researching a specific contact. It also has to be integrated into your dataworkflow. Companies are going to build a variety of networks inside and outside the enterprise. The big companies (SAP, IBM) are all rushing to offer collaborative and social network functionality. However, this is not entirely useful unless it’s integrated into the entire infrastructure.

• Moderator: Jim Metzler, Vice President, Ashton, Metzler & Associates
• Rowan Snyder, CIO, KPMG
• David Michael, CIO, United Business Media Group
• Joanna Young, Chief Information Officer, Corporate Information Systems & Enterprise Services, Liberty Mutual

Jim: Is the CIO a technical job anymore? For example, inside Liberty there are business projects with an IT component.

Joanna: We are organized to partner with internal business clients or vendors who provide objectives and business requirements. We strive to figure out the smallest amount of an IT investment we can make to get this to work.

Rowan: We have both. Part of the dilemma is that the thing that sells the best is fear. I don’t want to use that to get business.

Joanna: One good example is security from an application perspective. It’s hard to talk about security investments in business terms. We put it into terms like “this is what it will cost us if we DON’T do this.” For example, a solution for spam required us to do research into what it was costing us overall. Once we put it together, the business was all for it. You have to put your business hat on and think “how can I make this important for a businessperson?” If you can’t, you may need to ask yourself why you’re pushing services on them that they may not need.

Jim: Can you give us insight into business-IT alignment? What about governance?

Rowan: Governance is the hardest part of IT. It’s not like the technology is easy. If it’s a business project with an IT component, I don’t usually get involved. It comes down to overall budget. The infrastructure we own and let people know exactly what it will cost to do it. We are a distributed IT firm, there are multiple groups. This is the most distributed and risk-prone organization I’ve worked in. It can be difficult for the business to exert control. It demonstrates risk, in security, compliance, methodologies, etc.

Joanna: Governance has become a word that nobody wants to use. It suddenly implies that IT is the holder of all the money and they are the ones that get to decide. We stopped using that word and position IT as a strategic business partner.

David: We have a highly decentralized IT set-up. We have about 600 globally and around 40 in the headquarters. We have 10 CIOs for each division, and within each division it is decentralized. We try to run each unit as autonomous. This is a close alignment with IT and business. However, then the problem of how do you have commonality between divisions and collaboration?

Jim: How can you minimize risk in distributed environment using standards and procedures?

David: The reality is it can be impractical for an organization. You end up with a patchwork of platforms and technologies. We have to accept that we’ll have multiple solutions. We can attempt to push a standard, but overall have a much more relaxed approach to manage everything. There is a lot of equality between divisions in what they can choose to purchase.

Joanna: Standards are easier to apply the further down the staff you are. The most important thing with any of this is to understand why you are making the decisions. If there is a process and pros and cons are identified, there is a clear record of why decisions were made.

Audience Poll: Everyone raised their hand that MORE standards were needed.

Audience Question: Are there inefficiencies in the data center in terms of energy and green IT? What are you doing about it?

Joanna: Everyone focuses on cars for carbon footprints. But, it’s really buildings…and then data centers. The data center has the same importance as any other efficiency. They need to be running as cheaply as possible. Corporations have a responsibility to make sure they are energy efficient.

Rowan: We recently did a carbon footprint analysis, and found that half of carbon comes from electricity, with half of that from the data center.

David: Every company does have a responsibility to look at its carbon emission globally. Consider international travel, flying, etc. As much as possible, we are not building data centers. We are using other people’s data centers in an effort to get out of the data center business.

Audience Question: How do you balance the good from standards with agile development and possible roadblocks?

Joanna: Luckily agile development is under the CIO’s control. You can see the lifecycle and savings that occur. When I look, I check what the standards are that I’m measuring by.

Jim: Does web 2.0 have any business meaning in your environment? If so, what are you doing about it?

Joanna: I’ve been in IT for 20 years. It’s another component to business IT investment, and has to be presented as such. As IT professionals we have a responsibility to identify what Web 2.0 is, and then translate to see if there is anything the company should be doing with it. Monitor it based on your current portfolio, and consider its impact.

David: It’s pretty important to our business as a media company. I don’t think it means one thing, it’s a term people use to talk about the web and what’s going on online. From mobile, to ajax, cloud computing or mashups - you can draw multiple conclusions. More and more business is being done online. We have a lot of growth opportunities online.

Rowan: Compliance, security, and privacy issues just explode with Web 2.0.