Anigel blogs

It may not be the most highly publicised day in the digital world, but today is the 4th Annual European Data Protection Day. The 28th January 2010 marks the anniversary of the adoption of the Council of Europe’s Convention on the protection of personal data (Convention 108), the first legally binding international instrument in the field of data protection.

Take this chance to make sure your staff are up to date with any data protection or processing policies you may use in your location and if you do not have any then you may want to start to investigate implementing one.

European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) press release

We have been reminded again of the importance of developing according to web standards rather than to support a single specific web browser.

There have been reports emerging over the past week that a major security breach at Google leaked a lot of private data to Chinese hackers. The hackers were able to exploit security vulnerabilities in the 10 year old browser and operating combination of IE6 on Windows XP.

This was a 0-day exploit, which means it was a new found vulnerability that the vendor (in this case Microsoft) and antivirus / security companies were unaware of. Meaning there was no security fix for this issue.

The main reason many companies including high street names and government organisations  are still using this browser is because of applications that were not written to be standards compliant and instead were specifically written to work in IE6. This means that despite the fact we have already gone through IE7 and now onto IE8, the old dinosaur of IE6 will not die.

Make sure you future proof your applications and investment by ensuring you are compliant with the most current standards rather than tying yourself to a single browser or vendors’ technology as that will always end up holding you back in the future.

With more and more organisations turning an eye to the blogosphere and social media in an effort to increase market share and brand awareness, it is very easy to drop the ball on security of your internet presence.

Whilst it is easy to focus budgets on new marketing opportunities and exciting new projects, existing web sites need to be maintained. There are two main aspects to this maintenance.

• Regular content updates – Nothing will keep a site as fresh and trending as new content, that however is something for another post
• Regular security audits and updates – which we discuss here

Your search engine optimisation activities rotate around trying to improve your position in search results and any good SEO campaign will reap benefits for you in this area. However you can find that within a relatively short period, your carefully constructed internet site can become exploited by less conscientious groups in an effort to improve their own ratings at your cost.

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I have finally got round to starting my technology blog.

For ages I have kept meaning to set up a blog for technology, systems and infrastructure stuff. It seems that now I have less free time as I have started working again, I have finally found the time to get it sorted.