Daily Archives: 12 February 2015

Is Europe Folding?

Posted on by
Reply

European Union foreign ministers, citing momentum behind a new peace initiative, on Monday delayed for a week the implementation of sanctions against a new group of individuals and companies in Russia and eastern Ukraine, EU officials said.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius is…hopeful:

Things are beginning—just beginning, we must be careful—to move.

Here’s how things are beginning to move: Russian-backed rebels have renewed their attacks with their objective of expanding their hold on Donetsk Oblast, and Russians and Russian-backed rebels have renewed their assault on Mariupol with the objective here to build a land bridge to Russian occupied Crimea.

In response to Congressional moves for the US—finally—to begin supplying even defensive arms to Ukraine,

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo pleaded with Washington to maintain “unity of action” with Europe.

The honorable gentleman from Spain has misspoken: he meant to say “unity of inaction.” While Ukraine burns.

No, the only peace initiative that has any legitimacy, the only peace agreement that can have any legitimacy, is one in which Russia withdraws from Ukraine. Completely.

Europe seems unwilling to do the things necessary to achieve that.

Personal Data Encryption vs Convenience

Posted on by
Reply

It appears Anthem Inc may have made a poor decision.

Recall that Anthem, the health insurer, got hacked a few days ago, giving up Social Security numbers and other personal data for 80 million customers to those hackers. It turns out that Anthem had deliberately chosen not to encrypt those data. At all.

Scrambling the data, which included addresses and phone numbers, could have made it less valuable to hackers or harder to access in bulk. It also would have made it harder for Anthem employees to track health care trends or share data with states and health providers[.]

Apparently, the company considered convenience more important than the sanctity of the personal data which those 80 million victims had entrusted to Anthem.

Naturally, Kristin Binns, Anthem’s Vice President of Public Relations, as cited by The Wall Street Journal, is excusing the failure:

Anthem encrypts personal data when it moves in or out of its database but not when it is stored, which is common in the industry.

Everybody does it, therefor it’s OK. No, Madam, everybody doing it just makes the failure widespread.

She added

We use other measures, including elevated user credentials, to limit access to the data when it is residing in a database[.]

Plainly inadequate measures. Your IT department could have told you that. If they did not, that omission would seem grounds for their termination. If they did, and senior Anthem management chose to ignore them, that would seem grounds for termination of senior management.