Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. Many readers of my previous blogs have failed to ask the question “Is there really an unbreakable cipher?” Even though they have been silent, I know some of them stayed awake nights with this provocative question – I will answer it below. In Hollywood movies, a bright hacker […]
Encryption, Primary Keys and Infinity
Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. A certain area of cyber security involves encryption. This necessarily includes a good passphrase, modular math and a lot of scrambling. Good encryption produces a coded message that appears like a series of random numbers. You see, in a real series of random numbers. There is infinite entropy. […]
Information Definitions are More than Operational Context
Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. Moving information recording from paper to electrons was a disruptive change, much like the change in written documents moving from stone to papyrus. This modern transformation is creating a labyrinth of new Data Governance issues, myriad incorrect assumptions, unnecessary procedures, rivers of external rules, conflicting internal policies, and […]
Why Cyber Security and Data Science Have Similar Problems
Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. To begin with, and I say this being of a certain age myself, most top managers are older people. Being older, many operated during a large part of their business career in a non-computer world. The concept of actually using computer data for business advantage only began recently, […]
Hidden Costs of Poor Data Quality
Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. Many people have written about the importance of Data Quality and most everything they have said is quite true, but besides the obvious costs of poor quality data. There are subtle hidden costs as well. A few of the obvious costs are the need to manually configure downloads […]
Why Data Professionals Should Be Careful of Internet Light Bulbs
Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. Many of us have rejoiced by having a thermostat for our homes that can be adjusted from a cell phone at work, and we can also check the house temperature from afar. Naturally, being data professionals, we have secured these systems with secure passwords such as “password1”, or […]
The Care and Feeding Of Your Virtual Private Networks
Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. The Internet is a marvelous system of connected systems. It is a global phenomenon that we are still learning how to use. Telephone networks could be said to be an ancestor of the Internet, as could the earlier telegraph systems. One factor common to all these electronic communication […]
Why We Can Locate a Size 14 Blue Jacket in Our Warehouse, But Can’t Find Our Sensitive Data
A Paradigm is a set way of looking at something. This makes some things we do more understandable, but often allows us to ignore other ways of doing it. When inventory automation was first introduced on mainframes in the 1960’s, most corporations still ran it only once a month. This was just as they had […]
Let’s Talk Encryption
Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. Wait! I promise – no math! Really! How encryption happens is not your job, and you may be excused from knowing the algorithms, remembering who discovered what, and why there is a secret key. Encryption systems scramble data into gibberish for protection, and then the gibberish can be […]
Ransomware – The New Cyber Protection Racket
Click to learn more about author David Schlesinger. Now that a number of newsworthy institutions such as hospitals, schools, and government offices, have fallen victim to what is called “Ransomware”, the media have finally noticed it. Ransomware, for those not yet familiar, is a pernicious type of cyber-attack where downloaded malware (i.e. “malware” is malicious software […]