Security

A disgruntled network administrator pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges of computer tampering for allegedly setting up an unauthorized access system and holding much of the city of San Francisco's computer network hostage

The security researcher who recently discovered a heretofore unknown flaw in the Internet's core Domain Name System (DNS) protocol warned IT managers on Thursday to expect more security fixes aimed at mitigating the issue over the coming months.

The 1979 film "When a Stranger Calls" portrayed the terror-filled night of a young woman fielding prank and increasingly threatening calls that climaxed when the police determined "the calls are coming from inside the house." Today IT security executives experience a similar chill down their spine when they realize the biggest threat they face comes from internal security attacks and data breaches.

The losses caused by a cybercrime ring broken up on Tuesday by Romania could reach into the millions of euros, an official with the General Inspectorate of the Romanian National Police said on Thursday.

Mozilla Corp. has patched a pair of critical vulnerabilities in Firefox, taking the unusual step of updating the older version 2.0 on Tuesday but delaying the fixes for the newer version 3.0 until Wednesday.

Rootkits are software code designed to hide from detection. So Kaspersky Lab's hunt for the elusive Rustock.C rootkit, rumored to exist for almost two years, reads like a detective plot.

Remember the old M&M analogy - security is like an M&M candy, hard shell on the outside, soft on the inside. In other words, put up firewalls, built a strong perimeter and you're good to go. Of course, nobody believes that M&M-type security is sufficient in today's world of insider threats, data leakage, mobile workers, thumb drives and sophisticated malware. So, what's the new metaphor? We asked around and came up with a number of interesting and useful ways to think about enterprise security.

CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work.

Fedora 9, released last month, included the first release of FreeIPA, a new free/open source project that comes out of Red Hat with the goal of becoming a complete and integrated security information management solution. In this article we take a look at exactly what FreeIPA is, both what it can do now and what its developers hope it will be capable of in the future. It seems destined to become a key feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and with Fedora 9 released and FreeIPA tightly integrated, now seems to be the perfect time to explore this new technology.

Name the previously ignored network device that is now at the forefront of information security? The usual suspects would be PCs, laptops, portable storage, servers, and perhaps critical pieces of infrastructure such as firewalls and email gateways, but they aren't exactly ignored. The security industry has built its fortune securing those.

Employment and training firm CVGT has installed a network management toolkit to enforce compliance and protect the financial and personal data of its 40,000-plus apprentices and trainees.

The University of Western Sydney (UWS) has today gone live with a managed Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for its 5000 users.

Sydney based law practice Law Partners Solicitors and Barristers (LPSB), has cleared network congestion and continual downtime by replacing its in-house Microsoft Outlook solution with hosted Exchange Server.

Employment and consulting agency Australian Recruiting has found refuge with a new anti-spam gateway and firewall solution after its IT network suffered a denial of service (DoS) attack, Trojan horse infections, and plagues of malware.

The Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) has rolled out automated patching software to minimize monthly load on staff manually patching machines.

Network-access-control start-up ConSentry Networks has filled its long-vacant CEO position with Joe Golden, a partner in Accel Partners, a ConSentry investor. Golden was a partner in Accel Partners' London venture-capital office from 2001 until ConSentry hired him; before that he was Cisco's managing director of business development and strategic alliances for Europe, Middle East and Africa. With NAC in flux and with some start-ups having failed, Golden spoke with Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene about ConSentry, its strategy and the future of NAC.

For more than a decade, Aviel "Avi" Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and an e-voting activist, has been a vocal critic of e-voting systems across the nation. In 2006, Rubin wrote the book, Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting, which heavily criticized e-voting machines for security and reliability shortcomings. https://secure.idg.com.au/admin/index.php?jid=1&l=1Rubin talked with Computerworld about the recent presidential primary election cycle and his thoughts on e-voting going into the November elections. The following is an edited version of that interview.

The Convention on Cybercrime is the work of the Council of Europe and is aimed at facilitating international cooperation in the investigation and prosecution of computer crimes. Since the Convention came into being in 2001, the COE has been working to address the growing international concern over the threats posed by hacking and other computer-related crimes.

James Fallows, national correspondent for US publication The Atlantic Monthly, has experienced "The Great Firewall of China" firsthand, an experience people from around the world will share this summer when the Olympics comes to that country. Based in Beijing, Fallows has researched the underlying technology that the Chinese use for Internet censorship, and he explained it in a recent article titled "The Connection Has Been Reset." We e-mailed Fallows questions about how the Chinese government controls Internet content available to its citizens, and here's what he had to say (Check out our slideshow on the 10 ways the Chinese Internet is different from yours).

The PCI Security Standards Council was established in the US by the major credit card companies in September 2006 as an independent organization to manage the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. In an interview, general manager Bob Russo talks about the council's efforts to administer the PCI standard amid continuing concerns about credit and debit card security. And he defends the standard, despite the recent data breaches at Hannaford Bros. and Okemo Mountain Resort.

There has been a lot of speculation devoted to the impending release of information about a DNS vulnerability discovered and initially announced by Dan Kaminsky almost two weeks ago. A lot of the coverage has been back and forth arguing about whether what has been discovered is relevant or not but the best thing to have done in the intervening period is to have sat on your hands and waited.

Security company Finjan Wednesday reported it has found more than 1,000 sites infected by an attack toolkit called "Asprox," which exploits discovered flaws in a vulnerable site's programming to add hidden attack code. The attack code in turn searches for flaws on a browser's PC, and if any such holes are found it will download malware onto the computer.

IT productivity is under increasing focus as businesses look for ways to reduce the cost of their daily business operations and increase profitability.

Reformed hacker-turned-security-consultant Kevin Mitnick served five years in federal prison for breaking into phone and software company networks. He talks about his past hacking exploits, computer security, and how he turned an illegal hobby into a useful career.

The Internet Storm Center, operated by SANS, is one of the leading sources when it comes to identifying emerging attacks against networks, through their DShield collaborative network analysis effort. Traffic spikes on network ports that are well above the normal rates of traffic flow can signify a rapidly spreading exploit or it could be a misconfigured network spewing rubbish across the rest of the Internet. One of the ISC's handlers noted a significant spike of traffic on port 7 recently and was surprised by what he found.

The news media is full of stories about e-mails and documents that were better off not sent. Last year an airline CEO accidentally sent an ultra harsh e-mail to complaining customers, the text of which was obviously not intended for the customers. Frustrated employees frequently send embarrassing internal memorandum to public news sources. And is there an e-mail user who hasn't regretted accidentally sending an e-mail to an unintended party? Whether e-mail or documents are sent intentionally or not, it is clear that content intended for a restricted audience is being shared with unauthorized parties on a regular basis.

Check Point Software's new Web browser security software, called ZoneAlarm ForceField, integrates a host-based firewall, anti-spyware, Web site rating, anti-phishing, and keylogger-jamming into a limited virtualization environment with the elegant user interface you've come to expect from the ZoneAlarm brand. Its goal is to provide superior anti-malware protection against the increasingly prevalent and complex threats posed to Internet surfers.

Just this week while I was on-site, an IT services company serving a client of mine asked for my help. They needed to know where to put their efforts in securing information. Their customers are varied, with a range of systems and connectivity. For each infrastructure, they wanted to know, where are the highest risks? In one case, there are two connections to the Internet, remote access, mobile users, and a complex web of systems and networks, some with external data sharing.

Traditionally, many IT specialists have seen networks as an open channel. They allow an infinite variety of devices to communicate, and the best networks make communication simple, free, and instantaneous -- like the air we breathe. Back in the early days of the Internet, shell accounts were free for the asking. Few people used passwords. It was an easy and altruistic era.

Companies often ascribe success to "doing one thing and doing it right." That philosophy is working for Orchestria and its ECC (electronic communication control) solution, which concentrates on preventing sensitive data from leaving organizations through e-mail, Web mail, and related channels, including blogs.