Jean Gordon Kocienda

I have a great job. As a Global Threat Analyst, I provide intelligence analysis to senior executives and security teams at Cisco. I focus on the confluence of global political trends and advanced persistent cyber threats. People frequently ask me how I got such an interesting job. I started as an En…

If you had asked me a few years ago, I might have predicted that the rise of large scale hacking and network-based Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) would spell the end of old-school espionage (poison-tipped umbrellas, office break-ins, dangles and the like). Those of us who fancy ourselves logical…

2014 was a terrible year for corporate data breaches. If there is to be any silver lining, information security professionals must draw lessons from the carnage. A good place to start is to identify common denominators. Several of the most damaging incidents started with phishing emails into office…

New year predictions generally take one of several forms: broad generalizations about multi-year trends, guesses about what might happen, or overviews of recent events disguised as predictions. The first is too easy, the second—going out on a limb—risks missing the mark so badly as to be useless. So…

Listening to the radio on the way to work recently, I heard that hackers had stolen some 1.2 billion usernames and passwords, affecting as many as 420,000 websites. When asked what listeners could do to protect themselves, the security expert speaking recommended changing passwords. He did not menti…

(I pulled this list together with the help of my colleague Martin Chorich. Or maybe it was the other way around. ) Every year, publications ranging from supermarket tabloids to serious academic journals issue forecasts for the coming year. Those with foresight hold on to these articles and read them…

Add this to your list of parties spoilt by the Internet revolution: national sovereignty. We all know that the borderless nature of the Internet is stretching longstanding technical and legal definitions. But recently, my colleague Richard Aceves and I got to talking about the mish-mash that social…

According to a Nielsen study, social media is no longer in its infancy.  No kidding. During the November military confrontation between Israel and Hamas, social media played a very grown-up role.  What distinguished it from past politically-charged social media exchanges was the participation of sta…