As every year before, it seemed that the state of information security got worse in 2011. The year saw a number of events that make it tempting to define the year as the year of information insecurity.
In 2011, data of more than 100 million people were compromised, as large corporation, small businesses and governments failed to protect it properly.
In 2011, we saw a number of demonstrations of how everything from cars and pacemakers to electricity generators and mass transportation systems can be hacked remotely. People started to realize that, as ICT become pervasive, so must information security.
In 2011, sophisticated biometrics started to become more widely used. US commando forces positively identify Osama Bin laden using a small mobile biometrics device that did face recognition and DNA samples. The Norwegian Information Security Laboratory demonstrated a mobile phone that would lock if it didn’t recognised the way the user walked. Facebook rolled out a face recognition system that could search through millions of online images to find images of you.
In 2011, cyberspace became militarized as the U.S. defined cyberattacks as acts of war. Their decision came in the wake of a cyber attack on Estonian governmental web sites (during a period with conflict with Russia) and the Stuxnet computer worm attack on the control systems of Iran’s nuclear power plants.
Today, most ordinary crimes leave digital evidence in one way or another, while at the same time, mobile technologies and the Internet have created entirely new crimes. In 2011, law enforcement started to act on the realization that crime today needs a lot of sophisticated competence not normally employed by the police, and Interpol announced their plans for building a center for digital forensics in Singapore.
In 2011, privacy was set back. We set it back each time we accept the terms and conditions before we download an app. Privacy was set back, and political fronts developed sharply, as data security clashed more strongly than ever before with privacy when the European Union promot-ed the data storage directive to its member states and the US congress and senate introduced.
And in 2011, we actually started to question information security, as it seems to hamper development and productivity and costs allied lives in military conflict zones.