This article completely ignores the big elephant in the room. Why was this information on a server hosted on the Internet? Shouldn't information like this be separated on a separate subnet? It talks about Intrusion detection systems and all sorts of technology to mitigate the risk, but the answer is simple. If your business data is isolated completely from your public facing presence, you need an insider or a physical break-in to be at risk.
I'll continue to use my google account for chatting with people for now, but if they pull the plug on 3rd party clients such as bitlbee, I'm done with google. I'll either setup my own jabber server running XMPP, or just switch back completely to IRC.
We are currently in the middle of a multi-million dollar energy management project at the University of North Carolina. There are many aspects of it, including creating generic web-service gateways to a variety of underlying low-level protocols (BACnet, LON, Sigma, KNX) and aggregating them up to a central monitoring system we call the Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS).
Former Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona is complaining that "science" was being stifled by politics. But he couldn't give an example of it. This was perhaps his most "damning" claim:
MESSAGE ACKNOWLEDGED -- The Pershing II missiles have been launched.
