When we founded Aveksa in 2004, the security and identity management markets were very different than they are today. Organizations were just beginning to come to terms with the need to involve the line-of-business in making access decisions and dealing with compliance requirements, and were oftentimes struggling with provisioning deployments that didn’t live up to expectations. At the same time, the threat landscape was much less dangerous than today, and compliance regulations were less onerous.

At my alma mater, come fifth semester, every would-be journalist is required to declare a beat. After a considerably lengthy back and forth in which I pondered my place in a competitive media market, I reluctantly passed on covering sports. It wasn’t because I wasn’t a fan; in fact, quite the opposite. It was just that I never fully understood how sports journalists—undoubtedly people who entered the field as a result of their fandom and passion for all things competitive—could ever remove bias from their reporting. Personally, I couldn’t write impartially about, say, the New York Yankees eliminating the Boston Red Sox from playoff contention without slipping in some sort of dig about the “Evil Empire” or ARod’s career-long love affair with anabolic steroids.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or more colloquially, NATO, is no stranger to uninvited data breaches. In 2011, Anonymous, the loosely affiliated network of basement-dwelling hackers bonded by their shared love of cyber mayhem and Guy Fawkes’ masks, breached NATO’s Web site, in the process, declaring “war” and christening themselves Internet “bandits” that “are not going anywhere.” Unfortunately, in the two years since, the self-described “hacktivists” have kept their word.

Recently, Aveksa was granted the opportunity to attend the 2013 Rocky Mountain Information Security Conference as a Gold sponsor. The two-day event, held in Denver, brought together industry leaders in Identity and Access Management (IAM) to discuss trends in the InfoSec community. Among the attendees were several esteemed speakers offering their expertise and opinions on the future of digital security.

If you’re like me, or really any other high school graduate, you’ve read “1984”.  So, you’ll understand when I compare US government-sanctioned data mining—most notably their insistence on monitoring every single Verizon phone call—to Orwell’s dystopian, Big Brother, totalitarian state.

In the iconic Kenny Rogers song The Gambler, the song’s namesake challenges the amateur player: “If you’re going to play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right.”  It’s certainly a sound recommendation if you’ve just plunked down a couple hundred on a hand of poker.  Take that money and multiply it by the thousands, though, and Kenny’s words have suddenly elevated from cutesy, folksy song to you better get your stuff together, dude. This is the predicament enterprises face when met with the challenge of putting a lid on data breaches or facing millions in fines from thousands of individual compromised records.

The United States Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) employs some 280,000 people managing the health benefits of an estimated 23 million veterans, making it the second largest cabinet department behind the Department of Defense.  But because the department can be perceived as an extension of the U.S. military, and the military is currently embroiled in their own headline-grapping exposure of a trove of classified information, the VA’s recent security breach has been largely underreported.  Unlike Pfc. Manning though, who intended to expose military “bloodlust” in the same way the release of the Pentagon Papers made evident the lies of the Johnson administration’s defense for involvement in Vietnam, there was a motive much simpler to the VA hacks. Money.   

Now that you’ve got that dreadful Men at Work song out of your head, the stakes may be raised very soon for our friends in Australia to put a lid on data breaches – as soon as March 2014.

Well, we’re probably years away from harnessing the regenerative powers of Turritopsis nutricula (the immortal jellyfish). And we’re also running out of time to purchase legitimate reproductions of the hoverboard Back to Future teased would be in store shelves come 2015.  But, hey, at least scientists have definitively determined the least productive time of the work day. Yay, priorities!

Verizon doesn’t just want to know if you can “hear them” now. The cell phone, television and business services giant is a trusted researcher of trends in the world of data breaches and other network attacks. Its annual Data Breach Investigations Report finds its way inevitably to my desk every year, and 2013 was no different.