Early yesterday morning, the Virya Technologies team left our office at Basepoint to go and setup Stands 8 & 9 ready for ISSBA's Suffolk Business Exhibition 2012. By the time Chris and Ruth arrived at the Office, I had already set the coffee machine brewing in order to provide the caffeine dependant amongst us with a much needed early-morning kickstart!

Upon arriving, we met up with Chris Pond who had helpfully agreed to help us run the stand and began setting up our little area (which felt far, far more organised than our last minute dash at SBE 11!). The guys at Trinity Park helpfully provided us with the power outlets we needed to run multiple machines (a true geek will always use more than one!)

It doesn't matter whether you are designing a new piece of software, a business process or even your end product, the importance of applying common sense and considering real-life scenarios simply cannot be understated.

A mistake can be very costly both in terms of time and reputation. If that mistake affects the way your customers interact with you, it could both expose your business to ridicule and potentially lose you custom.

A recently published issue with a Security Auditor has highlighted just how much potential there is for the worst to happen when information is requested by someone with a level of authority. In this particular case, the person being asked for the information had the sense to challenge the request, but it's easy to believe that many others would have simply attempted to comply.

The Security Auditor in question was insisting that the following be provided;

• A list of current user-names and plain-text passwords for all user accounts on all servers

• A list of all password changes for the past six months, again in plain-text

• A list of “every file added to the server from remote devices” in the past six months

• The public and private keys of an SSH keys

• An email sent to him every time a user changes their password, containing the plain-text password.

It should be pretty clear to most that this presents a huge security issue, but faced with a Payment Card Industry (PCI) Auditor making the request, how many would simply assume that he “must know what he's doing”?

Due to the wide range of software freely available under an Open Source License, users of Operating Systems such as Linux and the BSD’s are often stigmatised as being ‘cheapskates’. However, is this really fair? The Humble Indie Bundle suggests that users of Linux may in fact be more generous than their Mac and Windows loving counterparts.

There are hundreds of Linux Distributions available, each bringing it’s own unique set of benefits with many fulfilling some of the most niche requirements in the market. The US Department of Defense has recently added to this number by releasing Lightweight Portable Security (LPS)