Business IT maturity is expressed, the way IT in totality tags it’s prices for the products and services. Nevertheless, How it recovers its costs? Life as a consultant is tough. I’m not complaining, but we have to find small ways to introduce humour and keep our sanity. I wrote recently about how a consultant can use language clues to quickly assess both business and IT maturity. Sometimes, you don’t even need the clues! One of the ways I can put a sparkle into my day, when I meet a CIO I’ve never met before, at an organization I know nothing about, after a few minutes conversation, I pronounce, “I think your IT funding model is broken!” In every case, they look surprised, then reveal, “How did you know so quickly?” Of course, the answer is, funding models are nearly always broken. However, IT funding is one of the dominant causes for being intact at mid-Level 2 Business-IT Maturity. Below that point, much IT spend is funded by the project. To a degree, business clients underst...

Rock Phish attacks account for 50 percent of phishing incidents and have stolen “tens of millions of dollars” from bank accounts. This is the first time crimeware has been used in a Rock Phish attack. The victims of these phishing attacks get their personal data stolen and are infected by the Zeus Trojan, which is even worst for victims. In 2004 it was the first (and, for a long time, they were the only) gang to employ bot-nets in its phishing infrastructure in order to make the attacks live longer and be more scalable. It also pioneered new techniques in its spam mails so the mail could more easily evade spam filters. Within the past few weeks there has been a new advance — the inclusion of identity theft malware (or Crimeware) into the Rock group’s phishing attacks. While the term "botnet" can be used to refer to any group of bots, such as IRC bots , the word is generally used to refer to a collection of compromised computers (called zombie computers) running programs, usua...