Stories about: NSA

A server problem at the US National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.

Many Information Security practices have outcomes that are difficult to quantify. How do you prove that your measure is effective at preventing whatever malicious activity is out there from being effective against your system?

Once confined to marketing departments and media companies, the Mac is spilling over into a wider array of business environments, thanks to the confluence of a number of computing trends, not the least among them a rising tide of end-user affinity for the Apple experience.

Researchers are touting an innovative cryptography method they've developed called "functional encryption," which though largely untested in the real world, one day could have an impact on how enterprise data is encrypted, stored and decrypted.

US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his agency is working on a "reverse Manhattan Project" to help secure the federal government's computer systems.

Last month, SonicWall rolled out its next-generation unified threat management firewall appliance geared for the enterprise. In our exclusive test of the Network Security Appliance E7500, results show that SonicWall has, indeed, crashed through the speed barrier.

Almost any IT department worth its salt is deploying virtualization technology today to reduce power usage, make server and OS deployments more flexible, and better use storage and systems resources. But as virtualization technology gains in popularity, it may bring with it new risks, said Don Simard, the commercial solutions director at the US National Security Agency (NSA), the electronic intelligence and cryptographic agency once so secret its very existence was a secret. At the same time, virtualization technology may bring new protections, he noted.

The phrase "the thin end of the wedge" is a good description for those things that, if allowed or tolerated, enable other things that are bigger or worse to happen.

It was 1996, the bandwidth between Australia and the rest of the world was miserable, and Andrew Tridgell had a problem. He wanted to synchronize source code located in Australia with source code on machines around the world, but sending patches was annoying and error-prone, and just sending all the files was painfully slow. Most people would have just waited a few years for trans-Pacific bandwidth to improve; instead Tridgell wrote rsync, the first known instance of content-based addressing (also known as content-addressed storage, or compare-by-hash), an innovation which eventually spread to software like BitTorrent, git, and many document storage products on the market.

The possibility that there is a backdoor in one of the officially recommended random number generators (RNGs) used to create encryption keys, has caused two well-known encryption experts to declare the scheme to be useless.

Monta Vista, the mobile and embedded Linux company, unveiled version 5.0 of its carrier-grade embedded Linux kernel this week.