Dennis Fisher

The federal government is developing plans for a secure network operations center for all security information flowing to and from the government. The security operations center would be separate from other such facilities at federal agencies and would not necessarily be concerned with monitoring the operations of production government networks. Instead, the SOC would be […]

Security experts are monitoring what appears to be a coordinated effort to exploit a known vulnerability in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) implementation in Windows, and say that there may be a worm doing some of the work. The vulnerability in the SSL library in Windows has been known for some time, and there is […]

A persistent new spam campaign that purports to show recipients pictures of Osama bin Laden being captured is in fact a ruse that could lead victims to download a malicious Trojan. The e-mails have been flooding inboxes all over the Internet since Thursday, carrying a subject line that reads: “Osama bin Laden Captured.” The sending […]

Network Associates Inc. on Thursday said it has agreed to sell its Sniffer business unit for $275 million in cash and that it will change the companys name to McAfee Inc. once the sale is final. Both of the moves have been widely anticipated within the security industry for several months, and NAI officials have […]

Just hours after security experts revealed a new attack capable of taking down any device receiving TCP requests, Cisco Systems Inc. said that a large portion of its routers and switches contain a serious software flaw that also could be used by attackers to knock those devices offline. /zimages/4/28571.gifClick here for an analysis of the […]

Internet Security Systems Inc. on Tuesday posted earnings of 10 cents per share on revenue of $67 million for the first quarter. Although the revenue figure represents a 13 percent increase over the same period last year, earnings were down by one cent per share. Company officials said the Proventia line of multifunction security appliances […]

A security researcher has developed a new attack for a well-known flaw in the TCP protocol that allows an attacker to effectively shut down targeted routers and terminate existing TCP sessions at will. The scenario has many security experts worried, given the ubiquity of TCP and the fact that theres an attack tool already circulating […]

NetScreen Technologies has introduced its ISG 2000, a multifunction security appliance based on the companys latest ASIC. The box supports intrusion detection and prevention technologies. The ISG 2000 can handle 2G bps of firewall throughput and 1G bps of IP Security VPN traffic. The box has enough processing power to handle 10,000 simultaneous VPN tunnels […]

NEW YORK—Software security is in a sorry state right now and vendors, the government and industry organizations need to pull together to make some major changes in the near future, the countrys top cyber-security official said Monday. In a keynote speech at the Information Security Decisions conference here, Amit Yoran, director of the National Cyber […]

The computer industry and the federal government alike need to greatly improve their efforts to reduce the vulnerability of the nations networks, beginning with a major shift in the way software and hardware are built and sold, according to a federal report due out this week. The report, written by a task force from the […]

If the recent compromises of Unix and Linux machines at supercomputing centers and research universities around the country do nothing else, they should prove once and for all that there is nothing new under the sun. /zimages/5/28571.gifClick here to read more about the recent attacks. To veterans of the security world, or of the high-tech […]

Cisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday released a new protocol for authentication in an effort to help protect customers from security deficiencies in existing protocols, chiefly one developed years ago by Cisco. Known as EAP-FAST (Extensible Authentication Protocol-Flexible Authentication via Secure Tunneling), the new protocol differs from Ciscos LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol) in that it […]