James F. Booth

For more than 25 years, James Booth has provided consulting and legal services to telecommunications carriers and to enterprise companies that manage their own telecommunications networks. Since June of 2009 he has also served as General Counsel of Spread Networks, LLC, which is the industry leader in the construction and operation of low latency high speed networks. Before joining Spread he was General Counsel for OnFiber Communications, a competitive telecommunications provider, and was the sole attorney for Qwest Communications International in support of its construction of an 18,800 mile fiber optic network spanning the United States. Earlier he was lead counsel for U S WEST in its wireless and cable television ventures in the United States, Europe and Hong Kong.

Friday, November 15, 2013

The Human Hack: How to Fight an Internet Risk Technology Can't Fix

A year ago, James Robinson played a trick on about 600 salespeople at a company where you wouldn't expect the employees to be easily fooled. Staffers at Websense Inc. got a generic-looking e-mail that encouraged them to click on a link to learn which product they could sell to earn a bigger bonus. The link led to an unfamiliar website that asked for their user names and passwords. "What came back to us was crazy, it was in the 60 to 70 percentile -- people were clicking on the link," said Robinson, security architecture and strategy officer at the San Diego-based company. Of those who clicked, 80 percent proceeded to obediently type in their log-in credentials, which is the kind of information that could allow a hacker to break into a corporate network and steal critical data.
Even more alarming? These folks sell cyber-security products for a living.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-15/the-human-hack-how-to-fight-an-internet-risk-technology-can-t-fix.html