What links Twitter, stolen bikes and the Boston Police Department

Q: What links Twitter, stolen bikes and the Boston Police Department?
A: Infosecurity Adviser

London, UK – July 2009 (Eskenzi PR) – An innovative Twitter-based scheme operated by the Boston, MA., Police Department has got the thumbs up from Mike Barwise, a regular blogger on Infosecurity Adviser, the online community for the information security industry,
"The scheme, which involves posting relevant details on the Web by owners of the stolen bike, and that information being tweeted to police officers, bike shops and other relevant people, has been a success thanks to its immediacy and security," he said.

"The service is immediate, thanks to the use of Twitter as an information carrier for the messages, and secure, because the police department has a highly secure IT system," he added.

According to Barwise, the fact that the Boston PD has been able to securely implement Twitter on its IT resource sends a positive message out to IT managers everywhere.

Twitter is, he explained, an essential part of the communications infrastructure and, as a result, it is down to the IT manager to develop a security strategy to counter any potential problems its usage creates on a firm's computer resource.

And, says Barwise, using Twitter effectively isn't rocket science, especially when you realise that UK police in the 1970s and 1980s made use of pagers to relay information to groups of shopkeepers in selected cities across the UK, alerting them, for example, that a team of shop-lifters was in the area.

"From an IT manager's perspective, the use of Twitter by the Boston PD is fascinating as it's pretty obvious that the police operate a pretty tight ship on the IT security front," said Barwise.

"And if they didn't, we'd soon hear about it," he added.

For more on the Barwise's comments on the Boston PD: http://www.infosecurityadviser.com/view_message?id=129

Infosecurity Adviser is a unique community portal representing the information security industry and it's users, organized in association with Infosecurity Europe. It offers advice from industry experts and bloggers as well as end user product reviews. It also contains information on qualifications, career paths and jobs from all the major accreditation bodies and is supported by the Information Security Awareness Forum. For more information see http://www.infosecurityadviser.com

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