[ad_1]
MongoDB, a database software provider whose stock is in free fall, has just hired its very first information security officer. The appointment, announced Friday, shows the company is considering taking security more seriously, even as it faces stiffer competition from Amazon and other tech giants.
The new boss is Lena Smart, a cybersecurity professional in Norway. Smart previously held the same position at Tradeweb, a financial services company that provides the technology behind some of the electronic trading markets. Prior to joining Tradeweb, she was responsible for security at the New York Power Authority, where she worked for more than a decade. As a cellist in his spare time, Smart has confided, in his Scottish style, that his priority in his new job will be "to know what are the jewels of the crown – the data of our customers – and to ensure that that they are always protected. "
People leaving MongoDB and other unsecured web-based databases have been a persistent source of data leakage over the years. This month alone, a security researcher discovered such a sieve that exposed to the public a mine of sensitive information, including location data, on millions of people in China. The poorly configured repository appears to come from SenseNets, a Shenzhen-based company that will likely provide the Chinese government with face recognition and public surveillance technology to track the country's Muslim Uyghur population. This is just the last example of a leak; there are countless others.
Despite the frequency of these leaks, the situation seems to be improving. Most of these inadvertent leaks have appeared, in all fairness, in people using outdated instances of the company's so-called community publishing software, a free, simplified version of the database product. Mark Wheeler, a spokesman for MongoDB, conceded that this 12-year-old company "had a hard time finding the right balance between security and". the main security teams recruit, including tutors Davi Ottenheimer, Kenn White, and now Smart, change the equation.
Since Smart aims to protect all of MongoDB's business, the problem of data leaks ultimately falls on it. She says she will continue to educate customers on best practices in security. It also aims to equip the product development process of the company with security, quality badurance and testing from the earliest stages. "If we can enter at the very beginning" of the software development cycle, says Smart, this "will save us time and money and make our products more reliable and secure."
The problem of database leaks far exceeds MongoDB. This is also a problem for rivals like Amazon, especially its S3, Elastic and other compartments. Like many companies, these database manufacturers are now looking to strengthen their software in the hope of turning a historic weakness, cybersecurity, into a competitive badet. As Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO of MongoDB, says, Fortuneto make the company's products as secure as possible "is essential for our business".
Indeed, it is essential for MongoDB and, more and more, for all companies.
A version of this article was published for the first time in Cyber Saturday, weekend edition of The wealth technical information bulletin. Register here.
[ad_2]
Source link
