Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives
Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.
Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices
Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.
Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices
This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »January 12, 2009 — IDG News Service —
A group of more than 30 computer organizations has taken what some are calling a big step toward making software more secure.
Led by experts from the U.S. National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, Microsoft and Symantec, the group plans to publish on Monday a blueprint outlining the most dangerous software programming errors.
The list represents the first time the industry has reached consensus on the worst things that can happen when software is being written.
"The top 25 list gives developers a minimum set of coding errors that must be eradicated before software is used by customers," said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer with Veracode, in a prepared statement.
More than just a list, however, the document could be used as a negotiating tool between buyers and software vendors, said Alan Paller, director of research with the SANS Institute, a security training group that spearheaded the work.
In fact, New York state is now developing procurement documents that could be used by state agencies to make their vendors certify that their code contains none of these programming errors. Ultimately that will make the vendor, not the state, responsible when buggy software leads to a security problem, Paller said. "When the software is found to be flawed ... all of the economic liability shifts to them."
Paller expects that this kind of certification, virtually unknown today, will become more common now that such a large part of the industry has agreed on what programming errors are most dangerous. But he expects it to be used in large custom-coding contracts rather than in the software licensing agreements used for widely distributed software such as Microsoft Windows.
The flaws include things such as allowing for SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks, sending sensitive information in clear text, which can be easily read, and hard-coding security passwords into programs, where they're hard to change if discovered. The list of errors is set to be posted here.
Two of these bugs led to more than 1.5 million Web site breaches last year, SANS said. And that was just the start: Often, these Web breaches were used by online attackers to then launch more attacks against people who surfed the hacked sites.