How NOT to protect your intranet

Inaccuracies in a Baqu?ɬ?a article started me thinking about the trustworthiness of this well-known Spanish site and intelligence services company.

The article I am talking about is “How to protect the intranet of my company?” [1] and contains some blatant errors such as “What distinguishes an intranet from other types of networks is the protocol used for the communication between the computers, which is TCP/IP, the same protocol that is used on the Internet.” [2] (wrong; what distinguishes an intranet from other networks is that it is for internal use within an organization, as opposed to the Internet, which is a publicly accessible network).

I wondered why this article, published on the 11th November 2004, suddenly popped into the RSS feed. A closer look explained the mistery: Baqu?ɬ?a is running on their front page an article on security management [3] written by Jes?ɬ?s S?ɬ�nchez Echeverr?ɬ?a, introduced as a “lawyer specialist in new technologies from Audea.com” [4]. This is exactly the same line Baqu?ɬ?a uses to describe Llanos Manzanares, the author of the intranet article. Even more: the four “related news” links beside the front-page article point to articles written by “lawyers specialists in new technologies from Audea.com”. Unfortunately, it is only at the end of each article where we find the affiliation of the author, and there is no clear explanation of why Baqu?ɬ?a is publishing this Audea.com articles. If this is just advertising, why doesn’t Baqu?ɬ?a make it clear somehow?

Interestingly, the name of Jes?ɬ?s S?ɬ�nchez Echeverr?ɬ?a links to the e-mail address llmanzanares@audea.info. Are Jes?ɬ?s S?ɬ�nchez and Llanos Manzanares the same person? If not, why does one of them read the e-mail directed to the other one? Is it that Jes?ɬ?s S?ɬ�nchez cannot be trusted to answer his own e-mail?

I suspect that Baqu?ɬ?a published this article for reasons other than its quality. But while I undestand that Baqu?ɬ?a is a company that wants to earn money, I don’t think that publishing such low-quality content is not a good long-term strategy. And not disclosing the terms under which this articles are published makes me doubt the relevance of everything else I might read on Baqu?ɬ?a.

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[1] ?Ǭ�C?ɬ?mo proteger la intranet de mi empresa?

[2] Translated from “Lo que distingue a una intranet de otros tipos de redes es el protocolo usado para la comunicaci?ɬ?n entre los ordenadores, que es el TCP/IP, el mismo que se utiliza en Internet.”

[3] Gesti?ɬ?n de la seguridad de la informaci?ɬ?n en la empresa

[4] Translated from “Abogado especialista en Nuevas Tecnolog?ɬ?as de Audea.com”