Brian Prince

Oracle released fixes for a total of 41 bugs in its April Critical Patch Update, including a serious vulnerability affecting Oracle Application Server. The CPU, Oracle’s second of the year, includes 17 fixes for Oracle Database products, 11 for the Oracle E-Business Suite, six for the Oracle Siebel Enterprise Suite, three for Oracle Application Server, […]

A SQL chip for every MySQL database server-that’s the vision of Kickfire, a startup with its eyes on the data warehousing market. The company contends that its new SQL chip, built into the Kickfire Database Appliance the company unveiled April 14 as a beta, loosens the I/O bottleneck that slows data queries by pulling data […]

Sybase has launched a beta program for the latest version of its SQL Anywhere embedded database and packed the product with more than 200 new features. Code-named Panorama, SQL Anywhere 11 is slated to be released in the third quarter of 2008. According to Sybase, the current incarnation of SQL Anywhere powers thousands of embedded […]

Oracle is pushing role management as a key element of its security strategy. The approach, which the company calls service-oriented security, is meant to help organizations simplify and centralize critical security tasks, including authentication, user administration and role management. In a keynote address April 10 during the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Thomas Kurian, senior […]

Virtualization security is top of mind for some attendees at the RSA Conference held April 7 to 11 in San Francisco, and vendors big and small are taking notice. IBM kicked off its involvement with the conference by revealing a research project, dubbed “Phantom,” focused on protecting the hypervisor and blocking malicious traffic between virtual […]

SAN FRANCISCO – McAfee officials elaborated on their plan to put a greater emphasis on IT governance, risk and compliance April 9 at the RSA Conference here. The security vendor’s recently established Risk and Compliance Business Unit allows the company to focus on integrating and adding products and services to its GRC portfolio – starting […]

SAN FRANCISCO-IBM is launching a security research project to protect the hypervisor and prevent malware from infecting virtual environments. The project is a joint initiative from IBM X-Force and IBM Research, according to company officials, who discussed the effort April 7 here at the RSA Conference. The project, dubbed “Phantom,” is focused on creating technology […]

While MySQL may not be supplanting proprietary databases in the enterprise, the people behind the open-source database see solving the scalability problems of Web application developers as their ticket towards broader enterprise adoption. MySQL has traditionally been focused on being the top database for online applications, a focus that has not shifted with the acquisition […]

Symantec CEO John Thompson called for the federal government to pass legislation governing data breach notification and standards on how to handle and report an exposure of customer or proprietary data during his keynote at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. In his remarks, Thompson noted that the number of exposed privacy records due to […]

Cisco Systems and EMC announced a plan to integrate products and services to provide end-to-end security for enterprise data. The partnership, made public April 7 as part of a press and analyst session during the RSA Conference in San Francisco, will initially focus on DLP (data loss prevention), data encryption and key management. The collaboration […]

FaceTime Communications plans to expand its war on greynets in the enterprise with the addition of new capabilities meant to provide IT managers with control over 140 social networking sites, 20,000 individual Facebook widgets and more than 400 Web and real-time applications. The company announced the enhancements, which are slated to be available in its […]

Spammers increasingly used an old standby in March to reach e-mail inboxes- backscatter. The practice is back and Symantec researchers are calling it a wake-up call for MTA (mail transfer agent) administrators. In Symantec’s monthly State of Spam report, researchers reported that an increase in bounced messages had led to spammers forging sending e-mail addresses […]