Author: The Attributer
The Attributer’s Blog – Traceably Owned
Today’s big buzzwords are ‘blockchain’ and Bitcoin, but the concept has been around since the 1990s. The Attributer himself in 1998 was consulting for one of the companies involved in the Bolero consortium, a project to digitise and dematerialise paper bills of lading (BoLs). A BoL is a negotiable financial instrument. Ownership of the bill means ownership of the cargo […]
The Attributer’s Blog – Info-Warfare Ready
It is January 2017, and as Donald Trump prepares to take over as the new President of the USA, the debate rumbles on about the possible hacking, leaking and disinformation associated with Hilary Clinton’s election campaign. So what should we make of these allegations? Let’s look at what we know. In March 2016 Hilary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, received […]
The Attributer’s Blog – In Control
The US Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has had a huge influence on both American businesses and those in the rest of the world, especially those who want to do business with or in the USA. Section 404 of the act tells us that the management has to be in control, and that the auditors must verify this. A manager must […]
The Attributer’s Blog – Business Strategic
The Attributer writes this just after the announcement by Yahoo that, back in 2014, “state-sponsored” hackers stole information from about 500 million users in what appears to be the largest publicly disclosed cyber-breach in history. What! And now you’re telling those users that they should “change their passwords”, some two years later. Isn’t that a bit late? Horses and stable […]
The Attributer’s Blog – Regression Planned
First reported in the Telegraph on 21st April 2016, and later by Channel Four News on 24th May 2016, was an incident affecting UK National Security that occurred during the previous year, on 13th June 2015. “Semaphore, the computer system that checks passengers on their way to the UK against watch lists of suspect individuals, had faltered after being flooded […]
The Attributer’s Blog – Exit-Ready
Sometimes an enterprise has to get out of some business arrangement for some reason. It may be something the business has been considering for some time and finally comes to a decision after some trigger event, or it may occasionally be a totally unexpected requirement to find a way out, triggered by an event totally unexpected or at least uncertain. […]
The Attributer’s Blog – Informed
An important aspect of good system design is that users should understand how the system works for their benefit. The attribute ‘informed’ is defined in the Big Blue Book of SABSA (Enterprise Security Architecture: A Business Driven Approach, Sherwood, Clark and Lynas) as follows: “The user should be kept fully informed about services, operating procedures, operational schedules, planned outages, and […]
The Attributer’s Blog – Safe
In this article we pick up the thread of the previous article on the attribute ‘emergent’ with regard to system properties and follow it through on a specific path – that of systems safety. By ‘safety’ we mean not being injurious or dangerous to human life and health. Safety and security are closely related concepts. In the French and Dutch […]