John Pescatore

Door knob rattling is a good example of beating the bad guys to the punch – if they are going to check for open doors, we do it first and lock the doors we find were left unlocked. Vulnerability scanning and penetration testing are the modern day equivalents.

Extra credit bonus question: what large information security company got its start because of security guards rattling doorknobs??

Brand monitoring services – searching the web to see if someone is hosting copies of your content – is another variant of this. Find the phishing sites before your users fall for them – reactive but necessary given the way the World Wide Web was built.  

It is pretty much time to extend that out to more detailed analysis of the content showing up on social networks. Autonomy announced it’s Interwoven Social Media Analysis, which monitors social media content and tried to give marketers a head’s up on negative sentiment about their products. So, if the good guys are using that type of technology, the bad guys certainly are, too.  Time for some new age  doorknob rattling.

If your company is rushing out to get on Facebook/Myspace/Youtube etc (like all government agencies right now), are you monitoring the dialogs to see if privacy related information is leaking out, or if inappropriate employee posts are putting the company at risk? Andrew Walls of Gartner has some research notes out on this area and Mark Nicolett and I have put out some notes on dealing with use of these consumer grade technologies.