Has the focus of malware attacks shifted from Windows to Android?  Not completely, I’m sure.  But as the Wall Street Journal reported this morning,

A major software attack on mobile phones has put pressure on Google Inc. to do more to secure its online store for smartphone applications.

The company behind the now ubiquitous Android operating system came under fire after computer-security experts last week uncovered more than 50 malicious applications that were uploaded to and distributed from Google’s Android Market. …

Google has said 58 malicious apps were uploaded to Android Market and then downloaded to around 260,000 devices before Google removed the affected apps last Tuesday evening. It isn’t clear how many users activated the applications, a Google spokesman said.

Google doesn’t employee people to evaluate and approve applications before they are posted to the Android store, but rather depends on consumers to report bad behavior.  Unfortunately, that practices can allow attacks like this latest wave to compromise the integrity of downloaded apps.

The apps involved in the latest incident were corrupted versions of legitimate products from three different developers. The apps, which included Super Guitar Solo, Advanced Barcode Scanner, Bubble Shoot and dozens of others, were adulterated with a malicious code called "DroidDream" that could compromise sensitive personal data, including the IMSI number of the user’s phone, a unique identifier that carriers try to protect.

I’ll bet Google will quickly change its practices in this area.  There’s nothing like a bunch of infected apps to play havoc with brand loyalty.

Have you ever clicked on “Reply All” and then realize you have sent your reply to all 500 people (or 5,000) on an email distribution list?  Arrrrrgggggh! 

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting story today about this all-to-frequent mishap in the email world.  I hadn’t realized how extensive the “email storms” can be as people reply again and again to such events.

Some email storms have lasted so long—overloading servers with hundreds of thousands of emails—that at least one company, TV-ratings provider Nielsen Co., has disconnected the "Reply to All" button from its system.

In 1997, Microsoft weathered a storm involving an estimated 15 million emails. A 2007 email storm at the U.S Department of Homeland Security clogged the system with millions of emails.

Here is an interesting diagram illustrating how one “reply to all” can cascade into a large storm:

So, next time you are temped to click on “Reply All”, please think twice, or thrice.

The Washington Examiner reported yesterday that:

The U.S. Naval Academy is changing its core curriculum for the first time in about 10 years by adding two cybersecurity courses …

The two new requirements come as the school is ramping up training in a field of growing importance to national security. …

"All along, our role has been to develop one or two courses that would give every academy graduate a solid foundation in cybersecurity," said Andrew Phillips, the school’s academic dean. "We spent over a year now collecting advice and feedback from the Navy and the Marine Corps and shopping our ideas around with anyone who might have an opinion and some expertise in this area."

It was interesting to read that the Navy is trailing the U.S. Military Academy and U.S. Air Force Academy, which have had cybersecurity as part of information technology requirements for more than a decade.

Maybe Leroy Jethro Gibbs and the crew over at NCSI convinced the Navy they should step into the modern era!

What happens when you want to scan everything in the world and streets are too narrow for cars? Invent a scanning tricycle!  That’s what Google did.

A recent PCWorld article describes the Google Trike:

In 2009, Google introduced the Google Trike, a 250-pound, 9-foot-long, 7-foot-high bicycle equipped with the same terrain-charting cameras that deck out its Street View cars. The idea behind the Google Trike is to scope out locations where cars can’t go, such as parks, trails, university campuses, pedestrian malls, zoos, and other landmarks.

Now Google has released loads of new images taken from the Trike, such as the Château de Chenonceaux in Civray-de-Touraine, France and the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin. The pictures are accessible through Google Street View.

This short video shows how it works. Just think what a great workout you would get if this was your job.

CNNMoney.com/Fortune Magazine published an intriguing article by Geoff Colvin  last Thursday, entitled “The World’s Most Admired Companies.” I enjoyed how the article compared the recent financial upheavals to the time when 40-year old Ted Turner skippered his yacht to victory through a terrible storm.  Turner’s strategy?

"We kept going at full speed during the height of the storm," he told an interviewer. But wasn’t he afraid? After all, 15 people died. Yes, he said, "but I was more scared of losing than I was of dying."

Mr. Colvin observed that many businesses weathered the economic storms differently than others, making this year the most tumultuous in the thirteen year history of “The World’s Most Admired”:

Now that the skies are clearing after the worst economic storm in modern history — far more violent than the experts had predicted — we face a surprising new roster of winners and losers, as our 2011 ranking of the World’s Most Admired Companies makes clear. Stress in the recession and financial crisis brought out traits that may not have been noticed when the sailing was smooth. Upstarts became champions. Famed competitors fell behind; some didn’t make it through the storm.

Ranking the Most Admired Companies was done by assigning scores in the categories of Innovation, People Management, Use of Assets, Social Responsibility, Management Quality, Financial Soundness, Long Term Investment, Product Quality and Global Competitiveness.  An interactive page is provided to view the complete list and by several categories.

It was interesting to see my employer, Oracle, ranked number 2 in the Computer Software industry (after Adobe) and 48th overall. 

My daughter Holly modeled her new convertible t-shirt for me this evening, showing how she can quickly morph from a happy teenager into a zombie of sorts.  I wonder if my Twitter friend @WausauLoner, who tweets about the emerging Zombie Apocalypse in Wausau, Wisconsin, would approve?

We are finally getting insight into the real purposes of social media, thanks to Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur:

Space.com reported yesterday that the U.S. Air Force’s second X-37B robotic space plane blasted off from Florida on the afternoon of March 5th on a mystery mission.  There was lots of secrecy around this launch, but space.com provided the following photo.  I find it interesting that this little shuttle-like spacecraft could just about fit in the room I’m sitting in right now.  I look forward to learning more of how this type of vehicle will be used in the future.

In a recent article in PCMAG.com, an interesting graphic highlighted the market share of smartphone operating system preference.  Where are you located?  I’m firmly in the Apple iOS camp, grateful that I bought an iPhone a year and a half ago, rather than casting my lot with the Palm/HP WebOS.

I enjoyed the comments John Dvorak made today in his article “The US Smartphone Revolution”:

Overlooked in the commotion, though, is the transformative nature of the entire market. The whole world is looking at these changes. Wherever you go, the hip, trendy phone users around the globe will most often be seen with one of these North American smartphones. And to be honest the hippest of the hip will have an iPhone.

I find this particularly amusing, because I recall a constant barrage of anti-American accusations during the late 1990s, whereby we were told that the mobile phone world has passed us by. When I was doing Silicon Spin, a cable show for TechTV, guests would often arrive having just visited Japan, carrying some dingbat phone, such as the Docomo, and singing its praises. …

It’s expected that within just a few years the entire market will consist of varieties of smartphones, whose designs and operation were all invented in the U.S. and Canada.

It’s great time to be an American!  Yes, my Canadian friends, we include you!

Way back in September 2009 (it seems like an eternity in Identity years), I made a prediction that data analytics would begin to play a larger role in the Identity and Access Management market:

Advanced data analytics will bring value to many identity-based activities such as Authentication (historical “fingerprints” based on your patterns of accessing online resources), Context/Purpose (predicting preferences from your historical activity) and Auditing (who really did what when?).

Following my blog post this morning, Alan Norquist, CEO and founder of Veriphyr, dropped me an email which at least partially confirmed that prediction.  Alan referred me to an article by Earl Perkins of Gartner entitled, Time for Intelligence and Clarity in IAM.

A few excerpts:

Something interesting is developing in the identity and access management arena. It isn’t new– if you look closely, you’ll recognize it from countless other technologies and processes that progress to maturity. IAM is no different. What I’m seeing is the maturing of intelligence. …

One could even say that once that knowledge gets into the hands of the right people and they make actionable decisions with it, it’s no longer knowledge– it’s intelligence. …

IAM should be (among other things) about clarity. How do we make clear to the business that there is intelligence on those [IAM] logs, waiting to be mined, and that intelligence may make all the difference in their decisions? The best way is to deliver it, to provide that IAM intelligence is more knowledge for IT users to make IT users’ lives easier. IAM intelligence can be part of the business intelligence realm if properly analyzed and presented to the right audiences.

Gartner calls this “Identity and Access Intelligence.”  I am trying to get a copy of the full Gartner report on this topic.  I’ll comment more when I do.