CFOs to CIOs: You Work for Me Now

According to new survey research from Gartner and Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF), CFOs are "increasingly becoming the top technology investment decision maker in many organizations," notes the announcement. In total, 482 senior finance managers responded to the 2010 Gartner/FERF technology study. The study revealed that 42 percent of organizations reported that their IT department (and, presumably, the CIO) reports to the CFO, 33 percent to the CEO, 16 percent to the COO, 2 percent to a chief administrative officer, and 7 percent to other officers. (This stands in marked contrast to CIO magazine’s 2010 State of the CIO data, which found that 43 percent of CIOs report to CEOs, and just 19 percent report to CFOs. Why the difference in data? Gartner/FERF surveyed CFOs and finance execs, and we surveyed CIOs, yet one wouldn’t think people would confuse, or lie about, their reporting relationships. Do CFOs figure such a result would only help in their power grab?) In addition, the Gartner/FERF report sheds light on how CFOs view their roles and organizational oversight responsibilities today:

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first published week of:   05/17/2010

China Details Homemade Supercomputer Plans
The machine will use an unfashionable chip design

It’s official: China’s next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson (also known as “Godson”) family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This is a sharp departure from China’s last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server.

The arrival of Dawning 6000 will be an important landmark for the Loongson processor family, which to date has been used only in inexpensive, low-power netbooks and nettop PCs. When the Dawning 5000a was initially announced, it too was meant to be built with Loongson processors, but the Dawning Information Industry Company, which built the computer, eventually went with AMD chips, citing a lack of support for Windows, and the ICT’s failure to deliver a sufficiently powerful chip in time.

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first published week of:   02/01/2010

Chinese government sites hacked daily

Nearly 200 Chinese government Web sites are hacked every day, with 80 percent of these cyber attacks coming from abroad, said the vice director of the State Information Center of Network and Information Security of China Ministry of Public Security, at the Fourth U.S.China Internet Industry Forum in Beijing November 9. “Eight out of ten computers with Internet access in China have experienced attacks by botnets,” he said. A report issued earlier this year by China National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT) showed 71 percent of the world’s botnets are located in China. Most of them are controlled by foreign hackers. As a nation that currently has 440 million Internet users, “China is the main victim of online criminals,” the vice director said. China cooperates with foreign governments to combat online criminals. So far, Chinese police have established bilateral cooperation with 30 countries including the United States, UK, and Germany. “China and the U.S. have the largest number of Internet users and the largest number of Web sites. We have broad cooperation prospects in combating online crimes. I sincerely invite American delegates coming to exchange views with us, putting forward more efficient mechanism to combat transborder cyber crimes,” the vice director said.

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first published week of:   11/15/2010

Cloud Computing: Four Questions to Ask Your Vendor

As cloud computing initiatives take hold in government, agencies need to consider the contracting implications of this new technology model. Managing a relationship where government data could reside on privately owned computing infrastructure located anywhere in the world demands that agencies ask some crucial questions of cloud vendors before they close the deal.

Daren Orzechowski, an intellectual property attorney who specializes in IT and outsourcing issues, said government agencies need answers to four fundamental questions before they choose a cloud-computing provider.

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first published week of:   01/18/2010

Critical flaws discovered in widely used embedded OS

Two critical vulnerabilities have been discovered in mission-critical systems used in 500 million devices, including VoIP phones, telecom equipment, military routing devices, automobile controls and spacecraft. Last week at the Security B-Sides and DEFCON conferences in Las Vegas, the chief security officer at Rapid7 and founder and chief architect of Metasploit, disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in VxWorks, which is used to power Apple Airport Extreme access points, Mars rovers and C-130 Hercules aircraft, in addition to microwaves, switches, sensors, telecom equipment and industrial control monitors. VxWorks has a service enabled by default that provides read or write access to a device’s memory and allows functions to be called, the chief security officer told SCMagazineUS.com August 3. The vulnerable service, called WDB agent, is a “debugger” for the VxWorks operating system that is used to diagnose problems and ensure code is working properly when a product is being developed. Meanwhile, a separate vulnerability involving the hashing algorithm that is used in the standard authentication API for VxWorks could allow an attacker to brute force a password. The hashing algorithm is susceptible to collisions, meaning an attacker would be able to brute force a password in a relatively short period of time by guessing a string that produces the same hash as a legitimate password, according to a separate advisory posted by US-CERT.

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first published week of:   08/09/2010

Cyber experts have proof that China has hijacked U.S.based Internet traffic

For 18 minutes in April 2010, China’s statecontrolled telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, including data from U.S. military, civilian organizations, and those of other U.S. allies. This massive redirection of data has received scant attention in the mainstream media because the mechanics of how the hijacking was carried out and the implications of the incident are difficult for those outside the cybersecurity community to grasp, said a top security expert at McAfee. The Chinese could have carried out eavesdropping on unprotected communications - including emails and instant messaging - manipulated data passing through their country or decrypted messages, McAfee’s vice president of threat research said. Nobody outside of China can say, at least publicly, what happened to the terrabytes of data after they entered China. The incident may receive more attention when the U.S.China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional committee, releases its annual report on the bilateral relationship November 17. A commission press release said the 2010 report will address “the increasingly sophisticated nature of malicious computer activity associated with China.”

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first published week of:   11/15/2010

Volume 31

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