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.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

How to protect yourself? Think like a hacker


Each headline seems worse than the last: Target, Apple, Home Depot. And now, JP Morgan Chase. Perhaps you are losing faith that American corporations are keeping your personal information safe from hackers, but you wonder, what else can you do?

You could try hacking yourself. In fact, you should.
Scared by the recent leak of embarrassing celebrity photos onto the Internet, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban recently tried it and ended up telling all his high-profile friends they should do the same. He pretended to be an Internet criminal set on accessing his Apple iCloud account, and tried breaking in—a technique called a "pentest," or penetration test, in the professional security world. Cuban discovered the same thing many corporations discover with a pen test: Seemingly sophisticated security techniques are often easily foiled by a quick Google search.
But there's good news: If you think like a hacker, you can lower your risk.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102057819