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C3 EXPO Keynote by CA Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke.

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M2 PRESSWIRE-30 June 2005-Computer Associates: C3 EXPO Keynote by CA Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke(C)1994-2005 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

RDATE:29062005

Jacob Javits Center - New York City

Good afternoon. It's a great pleasure to be here to talk about one of the greatest challenges to businesses today - managing security in an era of proliferating threats, increasing IT complexity, and heightened regulatory requirements.

It's ironic that we find ourselves in New York a city that for more than a decade has been leading the nation in crime reduction - talking about a virtual crime wave that is sweeping America and much of the world.

Sometimes being in business today feels like being under siege.

Scammers, hackers, phishers and the like pose a real threat to the integrity of the enterprise - and by extension to our businesses, government operations and our personal physical and financial well being.

A couple of weeks ago we learned that a credit card transaction company had been hit by a virus-like computer script that captured customer data, exposing as many as 40 million cardholders to potential fraud. The compromised data included names, banks and account numbers - data that could be used to steal funds.

Wherever you travel in the world - you find the same concerns.

I was in London last week - and security was top-of-mind amongst the executives I spoke with.

And no wonder.

You may have read that a British security agency recently warned that UK businesses and government organizations were being targeted for network attacks by malicious hackers in East Asia.

The agency noted that the hackers have developed Trojan horse programs designed to steal data from parts of the national infrastructure, which includes companies in the finance, transportation and telecommunications sectors, as well as government agencies.

Just think about some of the other big stories in the news lately regarding data security. Earlier this month, Citigroup said that UPS lost computer tapes containing sensitive information from 3.9 million CitiFinancial customers.

It was reminiscent of last February's news that Bank of America lost backup tapes containing the personally identifiable financial information and credit card data of 1.2 million customers.

In April arrests were made after electronic account records for some 500,000 banking customers at four different banks were allegedly stolen and sold to collection agencies in a data-theft case.

According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the crime in which former bank employees allegedly accessed the bank's data, is believed to be the largest breach of banking security in the U.S.

That case beat out an earlier crime in which Atlanta-based ChoicePoint discovered that scammers culled the personal information of 145,000 Americans in an attack on its consumer database, resulting in 750 individual cases of identity theft.

The perpetrators were able to trick the company, which provides consumer data services to insurance companies, other businesses and government agencies, by masquerading as legitimate customers.

The criminals set up fraudulent accounts with ChoicePoint by posing as businesses - including collection agencies that were looking to run background checks on potential customers.

After news of the theft broke, a company spokesperson said, "It's always been critical for us to verify that people are who they say they are, but we're working hard to deploy new technologies and tighten up the policies and procedures that ChoicePoint already had in place."

That's a wise move.

Despite the best efforts of America's companies to safeguard the confidential data of their customers,...

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