Business

Smartphones Transforming Business Travel

Business traveler Mike Monroe no longer rummages through his bag at the airline counter fishing for his flight ticket or confirmation number.

The consultant from Lakeland, Fla., has gone paperless, thanks to Continental Airlines' electronic boarding passes. Once he checks in online, the carrier e-mails a bar code to his phone. That code is scanned at security checkpoints and gates instead of a boarding pass. "It takes away a lot of annoyances."

Monroe also uses his BlackBerry for airlines' flight-change alerts, routing all calls into one number provided by Google Voice, turn-by-turn driving directions when he's behind the wheel and watching TV on Slingbox when he has downtime. He also carries an iPod Touch -- like an iPhone but without the phone -- to make international calls using Skype, get the latest sports scores and weather from Viigo and access Urbanspoon's reviews of nearby restaurants. "Nothing really cutting edge," Monroe says, "but I'm just trying every day to reduce the stress."

Monroe is a member of a growing army of tech-savvy travelers whose smartphones are transforming their travel habits. Beyond online maps and travel guides, travelers are turning to their phones to look up aircraft seat configuration, track taxis, reply to early hotel check-in requests, order room service and locate nearby colleagues.

Few Americans remain untouched by the effects of the mobile Internet. But the tech industry's core mission of getting people to lead untethered lives inevitably invites road warriors such as Monroe as early adopters of all their bells and whistles. The travel industry has responded with some of the most innovative applications available on smartphones. And more are coming.

Airlines and hotels are refining their mobile Web sites and creating applications, or "apps," for downloading to popular phone models, such as iPhones, BlackBerrys and Google Android phones. Entrepreneurial software developers are rolling out...
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McAfee: System Security Is Weak Despite Locked Doors

Evidence from the recent Aurora hack attacks on major American corporations suggest that many may have tightly locked virtual front doors, but no cybersecurity inside their systems, a McAfee expert warned on Wednesday. In a Security Insights blog post, Paul Kurtz, McAfee's chief technology officer, discussed his study of the December-through-February attacks on Google, Intel, Adobe Systems, and other large firms.

He concluded that "Many organizations have tight security around financial systems and other mission-critical systems, but leave their intellectual-property repositories broadly accessible. The company might have strong perimeter security, but once you're in, the [source code] is readily available."

Protecting 'Crown Jewels'

The Aurora attack, named for what is assumed to be the hackers' internal reference to the operation based on malware findings, is believed to have originated in China. The incident has strained relations between the U.S. and Chinese governments and caused Google to reconsider its presence there. The Wall Street Journal reported that as many as 100 companies may have been targeted.

Kurtz said the hackers "went after the crown jewels of the targeted companies, their intellectual property." To do so, they likely tried to gain access to source-code management systems used internally to manage projects. Once they cracked the systems, they would be free to steal the code or implant malicious code.

Kurtz and McAfee's Stuart McClure discussed their findings at the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, but didn't say whether Google or other companies lost their source code in the attack, according to the Journal. The two have published a white paper on their research available to companies on McAfee's web site.

Stepping Up Security

Data security is one of the fastest-growing technology sectors, with a 53 percent rise in open security positions in the second half of 2009, according to Barclay Simpson's annual market report.

"This is one of...
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