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Just as quickly as the tweets came in asking for donations, so too came the cyber criminals looking to divert funds from legitimate charities to their own pockets....

Unbelievable how fast the New Year has flown by already. It seems like we're all trying to get 12 months worth of work done in one....

Think about it: Identity theft, fraud, regulatory compliance, vendor management, security awareness, risk management, privacy. These topics have no industry loyalty; they're common to all public and private organizations....

And so it was at the RSA Conference 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, an interview with a different security vendor every half-hour, on the half-hour, for 3-and-a-half days....

What do these three topics have in common? They're the information security areas with the greatest potential for job growth, according to our new Information Security Today Career Trends Survey....

As December starts, already I'm talking with thought-leaders about what the world of information security might look like in 2010....

This week that all changed....

As this morning dawns on San Francisco, so begins the 2009 edition of the RSA Conference.

As anyone in information security can tell you, this is the Mardi Gras, the Super Bowl, the event in the industry. It's where security professionals from all walks of the public and private sectors come to discuss the major threats and solutions of the day....

Norm Lorentz served as the federal chief technology officer in 2002 and 2003, working within the White House Office of Management and Budget. In that job, Lorentz focused on developing the federal IT enterprise architecture, in which information security was a crucial component....

So conclude two Army officers. The existing cultures of the Army, Navy and Air Force are fundamentally incompatible to adequately defend against cyber attacks, argue Lt. Col. Gregory Conti and Col. John "Buck" Surdu, in an article published in IA newsletter. They characterize the cyber warfare components of each branch as "ill-fitting appendages that attempt to operate in inhospitable cultures where technical expertise is not recognized, cultivated or completely misunderstood."...

That breathtaking sum makes it crystal clear that potential data breaches have huge business implications for any healthcare organization....

Edgar Allan Poe might be the conference theme, but the topic everybody is talking about? Government.

From financial regulatory reform and compliance to the Obama Administration on cybersecurity, attendees and sponsors alike all are talking about the convergence of the U.S. federal government and information security....

In making her first public appearance since delivering her long-awaited cybersecurity review to President Obama last week, Melissa Hathaway took to the stage at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. And she did exactly what Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was criticized for when he made his first public appearance to discuss how the Obama administration would tackle economic recovery....

A team of computer scientists at the National Association of Standards and Technology (NIST) has come up with a working albeit long definition of cloud computing: "a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."...

Hathaway is acting senior director for cyberspace at the National Security and Homeland Security Councils, and for the past two months has been on an assignment from President Obama to assess the cybersecurity wherewithal of the federal government....

One could infer that by reading the words of Joseph McClelland. He's director of the Office of Electric Reliability at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the federal agency with jurisdiction over interstate electricity sales and wholesale electric rates....

According to the E-Government Act of 2002, the CIO technically the administrator of e-government and information technology serves as director of the CIO Council. But the top slot, chairman, goes to the deputy director of management of the White House Office of Management and Budget....

But don't tell that to Norman Lorentz, a strategic adviser at the nonpartisan and not-for-profit Partnership for Public Service. Lorentz can lay claim to being the federal government's first CTO seven years ago....

Nearly two dozen federal agency CISOs got a bit more expressive, of sorts, as they voiced their views about their jobs and federal government IT security as participants in a survey conducted last quarter by the IT security certification and training group (ISC)2, networking vendor Cisco and Government Futures, a Web 2.0 analysis and consulting firm....

First, a brief biography. I've been a journalist for too long. In my first job I used a manual typewriter and had a pair of sharp scissors and a paste pot on my desk....

Not knowing what she'll report, I suspect that most, but not necessarily all, of her recommendations will be accepted by the president. Here are my predictions on how facets of government cybersecurity policy will be adopted by Obama....

Legislation to create the post of White House cybersecurity advisor who would report directly to the president, introduced earlier this week by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D.-W.Va., and Olympia Snowe, R.-Maine, may prove to be a great idea. Yet, was the legislation introduced too soon?...

In his speech Friday outlining his administration's cybersecurity policy, the president said he knows how it feels to have his privacy violated because it has happened to him....

"Cyberspace is on the bottom of the ocean," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told a forum last week sponsored by the Washington think tank, the Center for International and Strategic Studies, according to a Defense News report, noting a significant portion of Internet traffic flows through cables embedded on the oceans' floor. Cybersecurity will "dominate our thinking and investments in a significant way" in the coming years, the nation's top admiral said....