The Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco to Oakland, California, carries approximately 280,000 vehicles per day. Many of those vehicles are transporting employees to their workplaces in the greater San Francisco-San Jose-Oakland area, which is why those of us who work at Cisco headquarters in San Jose were directly affected or know someone who was by the bridge’s recent and unexpected shutdown. This debacle, caused by failing and falling bridge beams, left thousands of workers stranded, backed up in traffic, or forced to find alternate means of getting to work, such as circuitous commutes, ferries, or public transit. Others found alternate means of working.

Employees with remote access capabilities and those whose jobs do not require full-time, in-person presences could telecommute during the bridge closing. Although this does not seem like a revolutionary notion in our day and age of anywhere, anytime work and with wireless access in every airport, hotel, and coffee shop, are most organizations gearing up all of their essential employees with the capabilities to work remotely? Can businesses ensure business-as-usual during major interruptions, such as severe weather, widespread employee illness, or bridge closings? New data suggests they can not.

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We learned from this past week’s Cyber Risk Report that inane Facebook status updates may in fact have value after all. Rodney Bradford mildly teased his pregnant girlfriend in front of his friends on the social networking site: “On the phone with this fat chick… where my IHOP.” If there was any chance that his “fat chick” was going to be upset about being left out of Rodney’s trip to get some pancakes, or even for being called “fat chick”, I’m betting she’ll give him a pass on this one.

Using this Facebook posting to corroborate an alibi, Rodney’s attorneys were able to convince the district attorney’s office to dismiss an armed robbery case against Bradford. Based on timestamp evidence provided by Facebook, and further alibis provided by Bradford’s family, the DA’s office was certain that Rodney could not have gotten from Harlem to Brooklyn in time to commit the robbery that took place one minutes after he made his now-famous posting.

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The idea of a global CERT has been proposed multiple times in the course of several years. And while it has not always been proposed in the same form, the concept is the same nonetheless. The idea is very simple — we need a global CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) to coordinate all other CERTs in the world.

Let us examine this idea through a dialog between two imaginary people, Mr. Pro and Mr. Con, who will debate some issues related to a global CERT, or G-CERT as we will call it for short. We will start the discussion by asking Mr. Pro to explain the benefit of a G-CERT.

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In this week’s Cyber Risk Report, we noted a recent article on CSO Online that mentions a rise in internal security incidents that are caused unintentionally or non-maliciously by employees. Employees, especially younger ones that have a lifelong connection to computers and the Internet, are becoming more involved with technologies and Internet resources in the workplace. As a result, companies are finding that their security policies, and in some cases their perimeters, are being breached by workers who are determined to access files, media, websites, or communities that are considered off-limits. Organizations and their security teams are challenged by the rise in disobedience and disdain for established policy. How can they be stopped?

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One of the recurring themes of 2009 for information security professionals has been the term “cyber”—whether used in the context of cyber security, cyberspace, cyber threats, cyber command, or even cyber war. Cyber traces its roots back to the Greek word kybernetes, meaning “governor,” and was picked up in 1948 by writer Norbert Wiener for his book on control sciences and electronic communications, and further extrapolated in 1984 by novelist William Gibson in his book Neuromancer. The term causes no small amount of consternation among industry purists who find the word imprecise and vague. Cyber security, after all, is little more than a shiny new name for what has long been known as information assurance, information security, or critical infrastructure assurance. If there is a reason for the term sticking in the current vernacular, and for simultaneously driving people crazy, it may be attributable to its sci-fi derivation, which evokes nefarious government “Big Brother” images.

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