Well, although there is not much local news regarding information security, I can comment on some trends I have seen. Here they are:

  1. More and more people are requesting forensics work
  2. More and more people are requesting internal investigation work
  3. Despite the crisis, companies seem to be increasingly concerned about the issue, either on their own initiative or by compliance with self-imposed regulations

Apart from that, I have noticed in recent weeks that the whole Twitter thing is really something big. Perhaps for us in Panama it is not so much, since the main function of Twitter is sending text messages (SMS). However, this part of the service is not enabled for our country, which reduces its mobility. But it is still a great source of real-time information that has a global impact.

I say this because in the last month and a half I have been following really important issues and finding out about things almost instantly through Twitter, such as the crisis in Iran (http://twitter.com/StopAhmadi and http://twitter.com/mousavi1388). More recently, I am following the crisis in Honduras where my alma mater UNITEC is located (http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23CrisisHN), in addition to other topics related to information security.

To give you an example, I found out that the Bing.com travel service (formerly Windows Live Search) was down for more than a day due to a fire in a data center in Seattle. Although you might say, what does that matter to me, it turns out that one of the most important payment authorization providers (Authorize.net) is hosted in the same data center. And guess what they use to keep people informed about what is happening? Twitter (http://twitter.com/authorizenet). This type of information is not available to the casual news site reader, at least not at this level of detail.

I try to follow important topics on Twitter. If you want to see what I have been able to gather from the Internet, you can follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/raulmillan) and see the topics I am following. You will not be bored reading.

For those who have Blackberrys and want to have Twitter “on the go” even without SMS messaging, you can do it using this tool (http://www.orangatame.com/products/twitterberry/).