Saturday, November 12, 2011

What is Security Clearance? And Types of Security Clearances

  

       Security Clearance

  Ø  A security clearance is an authorization that allows access to information that would otherwise be forbidden. Security clearances are commonly used in industry and government. Many jobs in information technology require security clearances. When a security clearance is required for access to specific information, the information is said to be classified. Security clearances can be issued for individuals or for groups.

      Types of Security Clearances:

Ø  Clearances are generally granted to particular level of information, so a job that requires access to confidential information would require a confidential clearance.

  Ø   Security levels are detailed below from lowest to highest:
Ø       Controlled Unclassified Information. Not a classification level, but a marker for information that cannot be distributed.

Ø       For Official Use Only (FOUO). Also known as Official Use Only (OUO). Not a classification level, but a marker for information that must be protected under the Privacy Act or other sensitive data.

Ø       Confidential. Also known as Public Trust. Provides access to information that reasonably could be expected to cause damage to national security if disclosed to unauthorized sources. Often given to military personnel. The investigation requires National Agency Check with Local Agency Check and Credit Check (NACLC) and goes back seven years. The investigation takes a few weeks to a few months. The clearance must be renewed every 15 years.


Ø       Secret. Also known as Collateral Secret or Ordinary Secret. Provides access to information that could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security if disclosed to unauthorized sources. The investigation requires an NACLC and goes back seven years. The investigation takes a few months to a year. The clearance must be renewed every 10 years.

Ø       Top Secret (TS). Provides access to national security, counterterrorism, counterintelligence or other highly sensitive data that could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security if disclosed to unauthorized sources. The investigation requires a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) and goes back 10 years. The investigation takes three to 18 months. The clearance must be renewed every 5 years.


Ø       Agency-Specific Clearances

Ø       Many federal agencies use customized clearance levels such as:
Ø       L clearance -- Civilian access to nuclear materials and information (U.S. Department of Energy [DOE], Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC])
Ø       Q clearance -- Access specifically relating to atomic or nuclear-related materials for non-military personnel (DOE, NRC)
Ø       Bureau of Immigration (BI) clearance -- Used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
Ø       National Agency Check with Inquiries (NACI) -- Used by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)
Ø       Yankee White -- Administrative nickname for a background check for personnel working with the president (Executive Office of the President)

Ø      Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI)

Many agencies append Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) to Top Secret clearances for a combination known as TS/SCI. Information access is assigned in "compartments" for a short or extended time so that a person with access to one compartment has no access to others. Compartmented access could include cryptography, overhead reconnaissance, communications intelligence or nuclear stockpile information. Specific SCIs are known as "riders" when appended to clearances. 

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) uses both SCI and a similar concept, special access programs (SAP), for exceptionally vulnerable information. SAP access could include information such as stealth technology. 

Both SCI and SAP designations require an SSBI investigation plus a special adjudication process.

Non-Government Clearances


Private-sector organizations occasionally use the term "security clearance" when granting access to sensitive information.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Search Google for LinkedIn profiles with current experience


You can search for LinkedIn profiles with current experience in a particular domain.

The Google search syntax is as follows:

keyword (site:www.linkedin.com/pub OR site:www.linkedin.com/in) -"pub/dir" Experience Present

For example, if you want to search LinkedIn profiles with current experience in banking, the Google search string will be:

banking (site:www.linkedin.com/pub OR site:www.linkedin.com/in) -"pub/dir" Experience Present



To Restrict Search to ONLY USA


banking (site:us.linkedin.com/pub OR site:us.linkedin.com/in) -"pub/dir" Experience Present




If you want to search only for UK 


banking (site:uk.linkedin.com/pub OR site:uk.linkedin.com/in) -"pub/dir" Experience Present


Happy Sourcing...... Please comment your thoughts....

Thanks
Kandula Santosh Kumar

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Finding Company Email Patterns

There are many ways to find company email formats, but most successful ways to find Email Patterns are


  • “email * company.com” (plus some optional keywords)
    and/or “email * * company.com” (I have added one more asterisk). Sometimes you will have to exclude addresses starting with “support”, “info”, or “sales” to get to “human’s” emails; we all know how to do that. It’s not necessary, however, to remove false positives if we see enough results to come to a conclusion.
    Here’s a simple example:
    If nothing can be found, you may want to find out whether the company website domain and the email domain differ and correct the search appropriately.


Finding Company Email Patterns

There are many ways to find company email formats, but most successful ways to find Email Patterns are






Sunday, July 10, 2011

How to Search for Google Plus Profiles



Searching for Google-plus profiles is no problem at all, whether you are already on Google-Plus or not. Here’s a direct link to a sample search:
- and please compare this with
See the difference? I have changed just one symbol in the search URL. The latter search returns both Google profiles and Google-plus profiles.
Unlike Google-profiles most Google-plus-profiles have a link to “send an email”. It’s sourcer’s paradise!
The search for people returns up to 1,000 results. (I think they could do better here.)
We can also X-ray Google-Plus, but apparently Google has not indexed all Google profiles yet (ha!), so people search returns better results. Advanced search operators do work in the dialog. There’s one very subtle difference in the search results display: instead of “Google+” – which is the page title – they show “Google Profile“.
Note: You will not be able to find me on Google Plus (yet).

Happy Hunting :-)

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Update Your LinkedIn X-Ray Searches for Location Names

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across something on LinkedIn that I am surprised I never noticed before – I’m not even certain if/when LinkedIn made the change.




Finally sitting down to write about it, I highly doubted that I could be the only person to have discovered this interesting little find, so I did some quick research and found that Gary Cozin and Cathy Ou recently noticed it as well.




What am I talking about?
I’m talking about the fact that LinkedIn has alternate location names for certain postal codes.
While some locations only have one location phrase, I’ve found many have two and some have as many as nine! If you use Internet search engines to “X-Ray” LinkedIn for public profiles and you only use one location phrase, you may be unknowingly excluding people you actually want to find!

Alternate Location Names on LinkedIn


I personally discovered that LinkedIn has multiple location phrases when I went to edit my profile a couple of weeks back.

I wasn’t changing my location, but this caught my eye:


Apparently, “Greater Atlanta Area” is the default.

Having noticed “Atlanta, Georgia” for the first time, I immediately when to Google and Bing to see how many people did not use the default “Greater Atlanta Area” location name.
I tried this search: site:linkedin.com “location * atlanta georgia” -”greater atlanta area” (inurl:pub
inurl:in) -dir

As you can see, after a few false positive results, plenty of people use the alternate location phrase/name. But don’t be fooled by Google’s estimated 100,000+ results – if you click through all of the pages you will end up on page 50 with slightly shy of 500 results.

Switching to Bing, I tried something similar: site:linkedin.com location near:8 “atlanta georgia” -”greater atlanta area” -dir


Bing claims nearly 3,000 people use the alternate LinkedIn location phrase/name, but if you click through to the last page of results, you should get slightly over 500. Interestingly, I noticed some false positive results crept in that should have been excluded by the search – but looking further into that is another post entirely.


So What’s the BIG Deal?

Although my test searches didn’t discover a ton of people using the alternate location name in Atlanta, if you don’t include the alternate location phrase(s) in your LinkedIn X-Ray searches of your target locations, you will unknowingly relegate people who do not use the default location phrase into the realm of LinkedIn’s Dark Matter – profiles that exist but your searches prevent you from discovering them.

For example, here are about 24 people in the Atlanta area who mention Java or J2EE on their LinkedIn profiles that cannot be retrieved with an X-Ray search that only targets “Greater Atlanta Area.”

 
What you should notice is that the public profiles of people who use the alternate location name show only the specific non-default location name that was searched for…








…however, if you click on “View Full Profile,” you will see something different – both the user-selected, non-default location name as well as the default location name:




 
 
 
On the full profile, you can mouse over either location listed and use them as a faceted search. On a public profile listing, you cannot click on the location name to conduct a search.


How Many LinkedIn Location Name Variants Are There?

While it appears that there is a pattern of 2 location phrase/name options for major U.S. cities (I checked New York City and a few others – you’ll have to check yours), I did stumble across the fact that some areas within certain countries have many more location names to choose from.

For example, check out this list for Postal Code AL2 1AB in the U.K.!

That probably isn’t the only postal code/area in the world that has more than a few location names, so if you rely heavily on X-Ray searching LinkedIn for sourcing talent, I highly recommend you scope out all of the location names for all of the cities/areas you source from.




On the opposite end of the spectrum, some of you don’t have to worry about multiple LinkedIn location names at all – some locations and even countries don’t have any postal codes and/or LinkedIn doesn’t recognize them, so there is only one location name (unless I am missing something):




 
 
 
 
 
Update Your LinkedIn X-Ray Searches


I’m not sure when LinkedIn enabled the ability for users to choose amongst multiple location names per postal code – do you know?



Regardless, I’m excited to share this on a global scale – if use Internet search engines to “X-Ray” public profiles on LinkedIn, be sure to search for all of the location names that users in your target geography have to choose from. If you don’t, you are likely to unknowingly prevent some available results from being returned.


Of course, if you have a LinkedIn Recruiter account, you don’t really have to worry about finding people via X-Ray searches…



Happy hunting!





Saturday, July 2, 2011

How To: Google X-Ray Search LinkedIn

Google X-Ray Search LinkedIn

This week’s topic covers how to do an X-Ray search of LinkedIn using Google.

Using Google to perform an “x-ray search” of LinkedIn is one of the best ways to find the profiles of people that are outside of your network. X-Ray searches work for any website, but we’ll focus on LinkedIn for now.


To perform an x-ray search, you simply start your search with the following search criteria:


site:linkedin.com

I will use an example of a recent search I did in an effort to find individuals with software security experience. Here is an example of one of the search strings I used in Google:

site:linkedin.com “greater seattle area” security (intrusion OR authentication OR firewall) support network* CISSP –profiles

When examining this Boolean search string you will probably notice a couple of things. For one, I did not use “AND” in between several of the words. The reason for this is two-fold: one, Google recognizes spaces as the “AND” operator and, secondly, since Google limits the number of words you can use in a search (I believe it is 25), you don’t want to waste valuable “real estate” with the “AND” operator if you don’t need it.

You will probably also notice that I included “-profiles” at the end of my search. Why did I do this? The reason is to eliminate results that will show up for a list of profiles that are sometimes unrelated to what you are looking for and only clutter your search results. Try taking it out of your search string and you will see what I am talking about. Any time you add a minus sign (-) in front of a word it will filter and not show results with that word, also known as a “negative” keyword.

Another thing you may have noticed was the asterisk (*) after the word “network.” In case some of you are unfamiliar with this Boolean operator, it is the “wild card” operator, meaning it will show any word that has “network” as its root. For example, this search will provide results that include the words “network,” “networking” and “networked” among others.

Stay tuned for more tips and tricks from kandula in the coming weeks. In the meantime…Happy Hunting!


Regards
Santosh Kumar K

Happy Hunting !

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

How To Source in Linkedin In Multiple Ways........



Linkedin Sourcing Techniques and Methods

LinkedIn is one of the most searchable social networks, and with many users filing out their profiles with as much detail as a resume, LinkedIn offers the deepest occupational and professional data of any of the social media sites. As such, it is extremely important that sourcers and recruiters learn how to master all of the various ways you can search LinkedIn to find potential candidates.














LinkedIn’s Search Interface

LinkedIn’s search interface is quite robust, supporting full Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT) for both keyword and structured field search (current/past title, current/past company, and school), allowing you to create complex and precise search strings. Interestingly, I haven’t hit the limit of LinkedIn’s search capability yet in terms of the maximum number of characters/words it can accept - it appears bottomless. Also of note is that even with a free LinkedIn account, you are able to save up to 3 searches.

X-Ray Searching LinkedIn

The vast majority of LinkedIn profiles are “public,” meaning that they are published on the web. In fact, I believe that when anyone creates a LinkedIn profile, the default/recommended setting is “Full View,” which automatically makes the profile available for Internet search engines to index them and make them available for searching. Only if someone takes the time to go into their “Account & Settings” and change their “Public Profile” to “None/off” would they not show up in web (Google, etc.) searches.

If a LinkedIn profile is published to the web, it can be found by using Internet search engines. This means that anyone can leverage a search engine such as Google and use the site: command to X-Ray search LinkedIn for all public profiles - whether they are in that person’s network or not.

This is especially helpful for those who have relatively small networks and for those who do not pay for premium access to Linkedin. When X-Raying LinkedIn, LinkedIn doesn’t “know” who you are, so it cannot limit your search results to only those people in your network. Also, with a free account, users are limited to viewing the first 100 results of any search when using LinkedIn’s search interface. Using a site like Google to X-Ray into LinkedIn, you can view up to 1000 results

Focused X-Ray String for Google

Instead of trying to exclude a long list of false positive non-profile terms, this string is designed to retrieve results by targeting ”in” or “pub” in the urls of LinkedIn profiles –

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory
X-Ray String to Search for Current Title

This string employs Google’s wildcard (asterisk) operator to target the phrase on LinkedIn profiles where current title is listed:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory “current * TITLE”
Unlocking “Private” Profiles

When searching from within LinkedIn, you will inevitably at some point encounter a result of someone that is not in your LinkedIn nework - there will be no name listed:

Check this link ,here it teaches how to unlock Linkedin private profiles

http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/wp-c...te_Profile.swf
Advanced Operators

In addition to supporting the standard Boolean operators, LinkedIn has their own set of unique ”advanced operators” that allow you to “hand-code” search strings that control most of LinkedIn’s structured fields (current/past title, current/past company, school, industry, joined, and location) without having to use the advanced search interface. In my opinion - this is one of the coolest and most useful aspects of searching Linkedin.

Check this link ,here it teaches how to use Advanced Operators in Linkedin
http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/wp-c..._Operators.swf

Conclusion

When it comes to searching LinkedIn to find candidates, you have several options - be sure to master and employ them all!

Here’s a breakdown of the Pros/Cons of each:

LinkedIn’s search interface:

Pros:

* Full Boolean logic in keyword, title, company, and school fields
* Ability to create insanely long and precise search strings

* Can search structured fields including current/past title, current/past company, school
* Precise location search, down to 10 mile zip code radius

Cons

* No root-word/wildcard search (LinkedIn, are you reading this?)
* You can’t see people who aren’t in your network (by design, I know)
* You’re limited to viewing the first 100 results with a free account

X-Ray Searching LinkedIn:

Pros:

* You can see ANY public profile, whether they are in your network or not
* You can view up to 1000 results
* You can leverage configurable proximity search (via Exalead) to find people on LinkedIn based on what they DO, not just what they say

Cons

* No support of full Boolean logic (via Google)
* Limited to 32 search terms (via Google)
* No structured field search (current/past title, current/past company, school)
* Limited to metro area search (no precise zip code search)

LinkedIn’s Advanced Operators

Pros:

* You can hand-code search strings using both Boolean operators and LinkedIn’s advanced operators to search for keywords and structured field data, controlling practically all of LinkedIn’s search fields
* All of the benefits of using LinkedIn’s search interface
* You can save your searches in Notepad and simply copy and paste them any time you need them, as pseudo-saved searches

Cons

* All the limitations of searching within LinkedIn (can’t see out-of-network results, limited to 100 with a free account)



Appreciate your valuable comments to kandulasantosh@gmail.com

Regards

Kandula Santosh Kumar






Sunday, January 2, 2011

Passive Sourcing in Minutes...

Generally to source passive candidates is a time consuming where we need to spend lot of time. But by using few tools we can source resumes from all over internet within minutes. I know you all are very excited to know that tool. Here we go!

Go to
https://www.recruiting.com/

For quick search type the keywords which you are looking and followed by the location and then click on search resumes.
For Example: Oracle DBA and Location NY

Here it looks like…


On the left side corner you can also select the site which you are looking for, and in the bottom even you have an option for Security Clearance. This save’s a lot of time when you are searching for Clearance candidates.

If you are looking for titles and more skills you can go for Advance Search. On right side corner you find an option called Advance Search please click on that, you will see below screen..

If you are looking for multiple skills use “All These Keywords” option.
If you are looking for one word use “Exact Phrase” option.
If you are looking for combination of skills use “One or More of these words” option.
If you want to exclude some words use “None of These Words” option.
In Location Option you can give City or State or Zipcode.

Happy Sourcing, Enjoy your Passive Search.


Wish you all Happy New Year!


Regards
Kandula Santosh Kumar
kandulasantosh@gmail.com