July 20, 2006
Entrust today announced it closed a deal last night to buy Redwood City, Calif.-based Business Signatures for $50 million.
July 19, 2006
"Technical Fellow" is the new job title for Mark Russinovich, co-founder of Winternals with Bryce Cogswell. Yesterday Microsoft announced it acquired Winternals for an undisclosed sum, and is taking Russinovich on board as a "Technical Fellow."
July 18, 2006
Mobile computng, especially when associated with the plethora of handheld devices on the market today, is a network manager's headache when it comes to security. Network World editor John Cox gives a summary of the pain points and some possible remedies in an article this week on the subject
July 17, 2006
Spending two weeks in the Dordogne region of France with family was a retreat from the the Web and network technology. In a region famous for medieval castles, prehistoric cave paintings and canoe trips down the Dordogne River, there was nary a computer in sight. But in those rustic valleys I was introduced to one technology new to me: the "smart key" for the car.
July 05, 2006
Ellen Messmer is on vacation, well earned, by the way. -- The Editors.
June 30, 2006
Storage vendor EMC won a secret bidding war to buy RSA Security for over $2 billion, with the deal expected to officially close by early next year. Some of the drama behind the deal spilled out last night as EMC and RSA executives defended the decision to combine their companies.
June 29, 2006
The Office of Management & Budget, the arm of the White House responsible for overseeing the federal agencies, is adopting a get-tough attitude in the wake of well-publicized security breaches at the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal Trade Commission.
June 28, 2006
RSA Security and Broadcom Corp. yesterday said they've entered an arrangement under which Broadcom is licensing the RSA SecurID technology for integration in the Broadcom BCM5890 secure processor. The idea is once the Broadcom chip is in a device the user purchases, the user could activate the one-time password token embedded in it instead of buying a separate handheld token.
June 27, 2006
What a lot of righteous indignation from the White House that the major newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, all had the story that the U.S. Treasury tries to identify money transfers by suspected terrorists by examining data transfered over the international banking network, SWIFT. President Bush is saying it's a "disgrace" that the media is writing about trying to track terrorists based on SWIFT exchanges.
June 26, 2006
People are often drawn to search for their roots, but not too many go in search of rootkits. Mark Russinovich, co-founder of Winternals Software, has a calling to find the stealthy "rootkit" code which acts as a cloaking mechanism most would never know was there. That he happened upon the rootkit code Sony BMG had hidden to monitor its CDs for copyright purposes sparked an important national debate. In an interview with Network World, Russinovich gets to the root of rookits.
June 23, 2006
Just when the uproar over the massive data loss at the Dept. of Veterans Affairs is dying down a bit, two more federal agencies -- the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture -- have reported bad news about data they hold being compromised.
June 22, 2006
The recent news item here about Citibank mandating use of security tokens for its small-to-midsize business customers in the U.S. drew interesting responses from readers. One comment makes the point that security tokens can be a real nuisance.
June 21, 2006
Yet another hole was found in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet yesterday, the second this week, which Microsoft says it's investigating. In the meantime, if you're worried that opening an Excel spreadsheet could let hackers take over your network, what should you do about it? Microsoft's suggestion: Don't use Excel.
June 20, 2006
While healthcare providers perform wonders of medicine these days, we don't typically associate them with innovation in networking. But in our story this week "An Rx in Security," it's evident that a growing number of hospitals are actively rolling out the kind of network upgrades any enterprise would envy.
June 19, 2006
This week's Technology Update in Network World focuses on two upcoming encryption standards for protecting data stored on tape and on disk.
June 16, 2006
There are a lot of ways to do strong authentication in lieu of passwords that can be shared and re-used.
Slowly but surely, banks with online operations are getting authentic about strong authentication for more of their customers. Citibank is among them.
June 15, 2006
Crypto expert and curmudgeon extraordinare Bruce Schneier is at it again with the June 16th edition of his ever-engaging monthly "Crypto-gram" newsletter. This time Schneier takes on the National Security Agency and its surveillance efforts on American soil, calling it an abuse of privacy that violates basic human rights. In raising anew the privacy debate, Schneier suggests the framers of the American Constitution would find a "constant assault" on privacy to be an "alien" concept. Unfortunately, dragging the writers of the Constitution into the argument is a mistake since they were hardly paragons of privacy.
June 14, 2006
Yesterday's "Patch Tuesday"--that day of the month when Microsoft discloses the problems in its products that could cause you big headaches if you don't apply the patches--was one helluva patchfest. According to Microsoft-watchers--who make a good living cleaning up after Microsoft--the Redmond giant is breaking its own records for patches.
June 13, 2006
Foundstone, the divsion at McAfee which develops vulnerability-assessment products, today posted free tools to help software developers improve security at their e-commerce sites. Specifically, Foundstone has come up with Web-based mock-ups of an online bank, a bookstore, a shipping site and a desktop travel application. The goal? Experimenting with these so-called "Hacme" mock-ups--which all have some sort of vulnerability planted in them--can show developers where security problems often crop up.
June 12, 2006
Most are familiar with Microsoft's "blue screen of death," that yawning empty blue that appears when Windows can't recover from a system error. It's one thing to see it on an office PC, and an even more blue experience to be bluescreened in an airport as flight information vanishes into the blue.
June 08, 2006
Hillary Clinton, New York senator, former First Lady and possible presidential candidate, was talking this week about how she finds the Internet to be a dangerous place for kids. She said parents are having a hard time keeping up with the online technologies that make violent and obscene content so easily available.
June 07, 2006
Yesterday McAfee said it has acquired start-up Preventsys, which makes the Preventsys Security Risk Management System for consolidatng multi-vendor data for a dashboard view of threat assessment and security compliance.
June 06, 2006
Financial-services firm UBS and federal prosecutors go to trial today against a former UBS employee, Roger Duronio, accused of planting a software logic bomb inside the bank's computer systems to destroy business information back in 2002. The New York Post today reports that UBS yesterday made a last-minute request to the judge to bar the public from the trial because it could cause the bank and its clients "serious embarrassment" and possibly reveal sensitive information about the UBS network and operations.
June 05, 2006
The job of the chief information security officer (CISO) is gaining in prestige, and the corporate techie can aspire to this top security position, according to Rolf Moulton, president of professional services association ISC2. But it's not just technical certifications that count. Getting out of the geek mindset and thinking about the business is a key personality requirement for the CISO job.
June 02, 2006
George Rathbun, director of IT architecture at Pfizer, recently shared his thoughts about the security measures crafted for information sharing in the biomedical industry under the collaborative effort known as "SAFE-BioPharma." Some of the ideas the biomedical companies are coming up with may have relevance for other industries, too.
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