ComputerWorld

This pilot fish and his wife are planning a long-overdue vacation to an all-inclusive resort — one of those places where you don’t have to worry about things like meals or tipping.

“I log onto the resort’s website in order to make some reservations ahead of our arrival,” fish says, “and am presented with the standard registration page.”

He enters his information on the page, which also asks “for security reasons” that he set up a password.

It’s not until after he has clicked “OK” that fish looks at the icon in his web browser and realizes the page isn’t encrypted. He does a quick browse of the source code for the page, and finds that there’s no SSL anywhere securing the data he’s just typed in.

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IT contractor has a project to upgrade some software for a client — and the project is way behind schedule, says a pilot fish on the client side.

And why is that such a problem? “The existing product goes End-of-Life soon, at which time it will no longer be an approved product for us,” fish explains.

“The contractor’s people come in and pitch their schedule to upper management. In the briefing, they bring up the fact that the new product is not even approved to be on our highly secured network, and they have not even started on getting it approved.

“Essentially, if they have to get it approved, they can never get it deployed on time.

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New regulations go into effect requiring more physical and electronic security at this health insurance company, so the company hires a chief security officer to oversee the efforts, says a pilot fish there.

“I was involved in the original security implementation on most of the systems and offered to help, but the new CSO refused our input,” fish says. “He put keycard access on the computer room and UPS room and confiscated any physical keys he could find.

“When asked what would happen if the keycard system went down, he responded that ‘mechanisms are in place,'” fish recalls.

Soon, only three people have physical keys: the CSO, chief financial officer and facilities manager.

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