A Sign Of The Times…

By Guy Bunker | August 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

… Or something more disturbing? So, Wikipedia is finally closing its doors to unrestricted editing, why? Well because it was being abused – and the reputation of the site was falling. When the Internet first came on the scene, the data was ‘good’, because the people who used it, wanted to share their knowledge and so when you searched for something (hey, this was pre-Google!) then the results tended to be useful. Subsequently, the data on the web has been diluted by less good information – some of which is completely wrong (although may be an individual’s opinion), this has made it harder to use it as a research tool. Wikipedia started up with the best intentions but it has now been subverted like the rest of the web. Unfortunately, this looks to be the way of most ‘open’ collaboration in the Web 2.0 world. I have written before on the problems associated with splog (blog spam) which means that comments, the ones that make it through the initial filter, have to be checked before they are posted – just in case they are inappropriate. As we depend more and more on the web, we need to ensure the data is correct – and this isn’t just the ‘static’ data, but also the calculated data as well.

I am preparing for a podcast recording for RSA Europe this afternoon, my session is on mitigating the security risks in the cloud – and one section is on computational integrity. If the service provider’s application makes a mistake… would you know? Now the mistake may be a genuine ‘bug’ or it might be malicious – how would you know? The answer is… well, most people haven’t thought about it yet, but for those who have there are a few ways to approach the problem. Perhaps the easiest of which is to have dummy transactions for which you know the outcome. That way, periodically you can test the application is still returning what you expect. Of course, it’s not really that simple – as you potentiall need to account for the dummy transactions in other business applications, but you get the idea.

As the cloud becomes more popular, its attractiveness to cyber-criminals will increase – and while a daft middle name for the prime minister on Wikipedia isn’t going to hurt your business, there are other things that might.

Guy Bunker

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