Quantifying the safety or danger of cyberspace is tough. But a highly respected IT security practitioner and an experienced risk management consultant have teamed to develop an index they contend reflects the relative security of cyberspace by aggregating the views of information security industry professionals.

Adam Greene, the primary author of the proposed

accounting of disclosures rule mandated under the HITECH Act, describes its major provisions and offers advice on how to prepare.

The same approach governments and businesses employ to protect individuals from the dangers of secondhand smoke could be applied to safeguard cyberspace, says Scott Charney, Microsoft's vice president of trustworthy computing, engineering excellence and environmental sustainability.

"Ethical hacking" - is the term an oxymoron, or is it one of today's necessities in the fight against cybercrime? Jay Bavisi, president and co-founder of the EC Council, feels strongly about why we need ethical hackers more today than ever before.

From Epsilon to Sony, recent data breaches and legislative trends tell a dramatic story about the turbulent state of privacy worldwide, according to J. Trevor Hughes, head of the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Kirk Herath, Chief Privacy Officer at Nationwide Insurance Companies, has been in privacy management for more than a decade, and he has two main concerns about today's enterprise: Mobile technology and cloud computing.

The recent data breaches at Epsilon and Sony should send a chilling message to privacy officers everywhere. "You can't prepare enough," says Kirk Herath, chief privacy officer of Nationwide Insurance Companies.

A new Chicago health information exchange will use a cloud computing architecture with security provisions, says Terri Jacobsen, who's directing the project.

One of the unexpected impacts of the global economic crisis is that many organizations have lost their business resiliency, says Lyndon Bird, director of The Business Continuity Institute, headquartered in the U.K.

Chris Painter knows that the United States must determine what are the standard behavioral practices on the Internet before achieving substantial international agreements on cybersecurity.