ReadWriteWeb

This month's online struggles between Wikileaks supporters participating in the ephemeral group called Anonymous and international corporations like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, who have stopped allowing their customers to donate money to Wikileaks, have brought electronic disruptions like Distributed Denials of Service (DDOS) to the forefront of peoples' minds all over the world.

DDOS attacks happen daily, but these politically motivated instances are easy to imagine becoming more common in the future. What happens, though, when the network of the future is made up not just of websites to block, but infrastructure like power grids and traffic management systems? Smart grid and Internet of Things networks of the future would be a very different context in which to consider actions like Anonymous' online mischief making.

You don't have to be United State government to recognize risks of having lax data security practices in place these days. And while larger organizations have robust IT departments, small companies often don't have the luxury of a huge budget.

Fortunately, there are a number of very simple ways in which small businesses can secure their data without burning a ton of cash.

Since the Firesheep extention was released a couple of weeks ago, more people have been paying attention to security vulnerabilities that can happen while using unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Indeed, as developer Eric Butler said when he created and released Firesheep, that was sort of the point.

Since Firesheep was released, there have been a number of countermeasures developed, ostensibly to warn if not protect users from potential side-jacking. Blacksheep, released earlier this week by Zscaler, generates "fake traffic" then monitors the network to see if Firesheep is active.

But Blacksheep warns you that it is, then what? Other than shutting off your notebook and perhaps relocating to a different cafe with free Wi-Fi, what are your options?

Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing have introduced a host of new security problems. But some companies are turning this problem on its head and using the cloud to deliver Security-as-a-Service. The Security-as-a-Service paradigm promises an end to expensive appliances and complex software deployment. We don't see most companies giving up firewalls and end-point protection clients yet, but here are three examples of how security in the cloud can work.

Video surveillance has come a long way. Cameras are everywhere. They are in airport terminals, parking lots, taxi cabs - the list goes on.

Data from video sources alone has grown at an astronomical rate. In turn, there has been an increasing need for video analytics to make sense of data, understand it and respond to a query or automatically based upon pre-programmed requests.

Video has proven to be an effective forensic tool to analyze data related to a bank robbery or other criminal activity. But we are entering a new age in our video society. According to the Video Analytics blog, the new challenge is about how the data can be used as a way to prevent crime more than anything else.