A measure of democratic rights in Africa by a foundation, sponsored by Mo Ibrahim, tries to make the case that insecurity will undermine future economic growth.

The report was mentioned by the BBC

The index groups indicators in four groups. In two of them, Sustainable Economic Opportunity and Human Development, the picture was mostly positive – and in fact no country declined significantly in these categories, the index authors said.

But in the other two categories – Safety and Rule of Law, and Participation and Human Rights – the picture was grimmer.

[…]

Africa is currently growing at four times the pace of Europe, helped by booming portable telephony and raw materials industries.

But 35 states have become less secure, while two-thirds of African countries show a declining performance in terms of human rights, the index suggests.

The foundation site has an excellent interface that makes it easy to compare the data for each country.

Communication between BT and ACS:Law were uncovered during the ACS:Law breach, possibly related to Operation PIAB. The BBC reports that the insecure transmission of customer data by BT violates the Data Protection Act

BT has admitted it sent the personal details of more than 500 customers as an unsecured document to legal firm ACS:Law, following a court order.

[…]

A BT official admitted “unencrypted” personal data was sent, adding it “would not happen again”.

A research paper for USENIX, “TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones”, accuses android applications of leaking information without user approval.

Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, we found 68 instances of potential misuse of users’ private information across 20 applications

Fifteen of the apps sent user data to advertising companies without user approval or notice, while other apps sent unique IDs and tracking/location data (even when the application did not run).

I want to throw around some theories.

Cyberwar, a term used widely in the news lately appears to be applied to attacks on nation-states, and very appropriately so.

Not spoken of very often are the attacks on and silent war by cyber criminals against corporations around the world.

Case in point is Friday’s Wall Street Journal front page article entitled “Accounts Raided In Global Bank Hack.” The main reason this war is not widely spoken about is that most attacks on private business go unreported. News of a security breach is potentially devastating to most private businesses. When the police are called in or get involved, it gets reported.

Despite the fact that statistically breaches on large corporations, like TJ Max, do not necessarily harm the corporation, who wants to take the chance of a damaged reputation they can’t recover from? But this is merely stating the obvious. As the potential for cyberwar increases nation-states continue to develop tools or weapons and strategies. So, what can corporations do besides detect, clean up, and re-secure their networks? Determine attribution? Huge problem. Comments, thoughts? Watch for some more thoughts on this topic and others.