Articles by Ed Moyle

Most of us are probably familiar with safe deposit boxes -- you know, the secure storage areas that banks and post offices provide to keep things like jewelry and important documents secure. Even if you've never rented one yourself, chances are you're probably familiar with the concept: a safe place where you can put important and one-of-a-kind items so that they'll be protected should the unexpected occur in your home (like a fire, theft or flood).

Have you ever tried to work when you're really sick? I don't mean a little cough or sniffles. I'm talking about a genuine, drag-out, "can't get out of bed" illness -- the kind where it hurts to stand up, let alone go into the office. I hate to admit it, but I've gone to work in that condition -- you probably have too (although pretty much everyon...

Remember the "Scantron" sheets that you had to fill out in school for taking standardized tests -- you know, the ones where you had to fill in the circle with a No. 2 pencil to mark your answer? Now imagine you're watching someone take a standardized math test -- you watch as they spend 15 minutes calculating the answer to a complicated problem.

Well, it's November again -- which means that it's just about time for this year's set of New Year's predictions. Every year around this time, everyone from antimalware companies to analyst firms line up to tell us about the top IT and security trends -- what they are and why we should care. This year, chances are they'll tell us all about cloud computing, virtualization and social networking and why these technologies are the new best (or worst) friends for security folks in 2010. ...

As a resident of New Hampshire, I can tell you that the Old Man of the Mountain is a very tender topic for Granite Staters. If you've never heard of it, the Old Man is -- or rather was -- a natural rock formation that was the spitting image of an old man's face. It was carved out of granite on the slope of Mt. Cannon, and if you've never seen it you can check out what it looked like on the back of the N.H. state quarter. ...

Over the holiday weekend, a family friend (whose husband is a contractor) introduced us to a great concept we hadn't heard before: The concept of "visual yield." It's a concept that I think anybody who's ever been involved in a home improvement project can understand and appreciate -- and it has more to do with information security (and technology in general) than you might think at first blush...

Imagine for a moment one of your company's employees getting out of their car and arriving at your office building. It doesn't really matter who it is, but for the sake of visualizing the scene more clearly, assume it's someone conservative and maybe a bit socially inept. Maybe it's one of the "suits" in accounting Now visualize this employee walki...

Everyone knows the old adage that "out of sight" is "out of mind." There's quite a bit of truth to it. It's a facet of human nature that things that are directly in front of our face get noticed, while things that are out of our scope of awareness don't. Seems pretty obvious, right? ...

We all know that some things are easier to do than others. In fact, what separates an average manager from a great one is the ability to balance decisions based on two almost totally unrelated sets of criteria: ease of accomplishment on the one hand vs. value to the organization on the other. Think about it this way: A manager that only focuses ...

Nowadays, being in IT means dealing with audits -- this is true regardless of whether you do business in a regulated industry (e.g., financial services, healthcare), whether you provide service to clients in those industries, or whether your organization has a non-vertical need for audit (i.e., you're a publicly traded company responsible for SOX compliance, or a retailer responsible for PCI compliance)...

"Vendor security questionnaire" -- three innocuous-sounding words that can leave security folks trembling. If you're in security -- no matter what company you're with -- there's a good chance you know exactly what I'm talking about, either because you've experienced firsthand the pain of trying to vet the information security controls of the mult...

Let's face facts: It's a hard economy right now. For those of us in the security business, a down economy hits us harder than most other areas of the business. Not only does our budget wallow in the doldrums just like other areas, but at the same time that we're stuck with less funding, the overall risk increases as well. It works like this: Less...

Have you heard the one about the beaver and the lumberjack? I remember it from when I was a kid: A beaver sees a lumberjack working in the forest. The beaver says to the lumberjack, "How can you cut down in one day what would take me months? At this rate you'll clear the forest before I can finish my dam." ...

Like many kids, I hated mowing the lawn. Also like many kids, I was the go-to guy for lots of family landscaping. The worst lawn to mow of all my relatives was my grandmother's: It was big, it was weedy and rocky, and (if you can believe it) she still had a push-mower But the strangest part of mowing her lawn was the neighbor down the street. This ...

This story was originally published on Sept. 18, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Physicists tell us that only a small percentage of the universe can be seen directly. In fact, the vast majority of the universe is what they call "dark" -- composed of matter and energy that we know is there but that we can't...

Right after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, I bought a used Netra T1 (a 1 rack-unit Sun box). I got it for a song on eBay from a hosting provider that was going under, and for the price, how could I pass it up? Sure, it was unnecessary -- but it was so cheap! I had to have it. At the time that I bought it, I wasn't entirely sure what I was ...

Folks in IT tend to ask a lot of questions. We're a curious breed by nature. In fact, we have to be. Change comes about so quickly in our industry, technology moves so fast, and our businesses adapt so fluidly that we have to ask questions just to keep up. Some might even say that a healthy curiosity is the hallmark of a successful IT professional -- and I wouldn't disagree...

Some people say that there's nothing worse than a sour economy. I, for one, don't agree. What could possibly be worse, you ask? Simple: a bad economy in the middle of a budget cycle. Securing funding for technology projects is hard enough nowadays, but IT security projects have it even harder. Try selling your management on an application securit...

Physicists tell us that only a small percentage of the universe can be seen directly. In fact, the vast majority of the universe is what they call "dark" -- composed of matter and energy that we know is there but that we can't observe, identify or analyze directly. The concept of "dark matter," first described in 1933 by physicist Fritz Zwicky, h...

Ever heard of Themistocles? In case you haven't, it's a tragic story. Themistocles was an Athenian statesman and general who lived around 500 B.C. He was one of the leading political minds of his time, and perhaps one of the most brilliant military strategists of his -- or any -- time as well. As a direct result of his actions, Athens became th...