Stories by: Ellen Messmer

Do cybergangs work on evil "product upgrades" to improve their crimeware and attack methods?

Proctor & Gamble, the global manufacturer of household products, Friday said it has selected IBM ISS to provide managed security services.

Companies that handle credit cards can expect to see revised security rules released in early October, according to the group responsible for maintaining the Payment Card Industry security standard for storage and processing of credit and debit cards.

Best Western International Monday acknowledged it suffered a data breach that exposed sensitive customer information at a European hotel, but strongly disputes claims that an attacker gained access to 8 million customer records with credit-card numbers. Best Western insists no more than a dozen customer records were compromised.

Carnegie-Mellon University Monday announced it's making available a free add-on to Mozilla Firefox 3.0 that's intended to boost browser security.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people.

Will infrastructure virtualization sweep away existing switching structures while failing to grant benefits of performance, cost or improved security? Some say yes.

What's so funny about information security? A lot if you read some of the bios that security experts have written about themselves in the official Black Hat conference guide. A tip of the Black Hat to the funniest excerpts from the official bios:

Symantec is acquiring nSuite Technologies for an undisclosed price to build out its portfolio of virtualization security and management technologies.

With McAfee buying data-loss-prevention vendor Reconnex for US$46 million in cash, the question now is how will McAfee move forward in the future to bring the Reconnex product suite into its portfolio, especially with the overlap in DLP products between the two?

The Jericho Forum, a group created in 2004 by IT security managers convinced that firewalls and other perimeter gateways had become a hindrance to e-commerce, made quite a splash with its rallying cry of "de-perimeterization."