He Was a Boy; She Was a Girl…
Information Assurance – IA – is one of those deceptively simple-looking things the military is a major proponent of; at a glance, most people would (not entirely incorrectly) think that “Information Assurance” was just a fancy way of saying “information security”, i.e. protecting computers, networks, and their contents from Bad People and their tools. Needless to say, it’s not quite that simple. Like most security-related things, IA is closely interrelated with other, similar disciplines; the glass-half-full guys might say it encompasses other things, like Operational Security, a/k/a OPSEC, and is greater than the sum of those many parts. (Most of the descriptions glass-half-empty people might use aren’t repeatable in polite company, alas.)
One of the must-visit resources for people interested in (or forced to take an interest in) IA is the Information Assurance Support Environment, or IASE. I periodically check their site for interesting tidbits, and recently stumbled across something that’s interesting on so many levels, it just had to be shared.
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