As usual, after swimming in the morning, I thumbed through my Blackberry.  On the small glass screen, I saw the email from a friend, “Hi, For: Did you send this email to me?”  I was very puzzled by what she meant that I quickly scrolled down to see the full text below her message: “Dear friend, I would like to introduce a good company who trades mainly in electronic products…”  I looked at the “From” line.  It is from my personal email account!  I knew immediately that some hacker hijacked my address book and used my email name to send out spam email.  But how did that happen?  How could I clean up this mess? I suspected that my not-so-strong password was hacked and I corrected it right away.  Since the send box identified who were the recipients. I then sent an email to explain the situation.  My sister-in-law shot me an email afterward: “I though it was a little strange. ” 

This cyber identity theft really makes me mad at the intruder and myself not taking more precaution measures.  I use my web email account everyday, save my personal data in the “cloud”, and provide my VISA card number to purchase online.  With the social media network, I may disclose even more personal information on the web.  This incident wakes me up that I need to protect myself diligently by adopting caution behaviors such as using the strong password or making sure confidential data are encrypted.  I also realize how much trust I have put in the datacenter and service provider that I may not even realize until I am personally affected.  Do the servers enforce strong passwords only?  How do I know the communication between my personal computers and the servers are secured?  Can the service provider be trusted?  It takes both the consumer end and the service providers together to create a secured environment.  Service provides have the fiduciary duty to protect their customers and their investors by focusing on datacenter security issues.  It may take only one security compromise to shake up the trust of the customers. 

I have been with Intel’s server group for the last 13 years and experienced many server technologies from form factor to power saving that have transformed the datacenters.  With our upcoming server platforms, we will be placing more focus on helping datacenters to secure their infrastructure.  We would like to see a day that no one will need to send an email to their friends to say: “I didn’t send that spam!”  

What is your story and resolution regarding security issues in cyber space and datacenters?