Dennis Fisher

Rather than spending Sunday defacing Web pages—which, lets admit it, has become a bit passé—some crackers decided instead to disrupt a planned defacement contest by knocking offline the Web site where competitors were supposed to record their crimes. The group directed a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against the Zone-H.org site about an hour after the defacement […]

Crackers and low-level online vandals are planning some post-Independence Day fireworks this weekend with a so-called Web site defacement challenge. The goal is for participants to deface as many sites as possible within the six-hour time limit. Some government organizations have issued warnings to their constituent agencies, cautioning them about the contest and urging them […]

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday plans to announce its new Identity Integration Server 2003, a stand-alone identity management server meant for large enterprise deployments. The new offering is Microsofts first real jump into the ID management market and comes at a time when a gaggle of vendors are all fighting for sales and name recognition in […]

As part of its transformation from anti-virus vendor to overall security provider, Network Associates Inc. last week introduced the latest version of its McAfee Desktop Firewall, which brings some intrusion prevention capabilities to the desktop. The key features in the new release are an application monitoring capability and a mode that enables administrators to prevent […]

Following the lead of many of its competitors, Computer Associates International Inc. has announced plans to debut a series of hardened security appliances jointly with longtime channel partners. This is CAs first foray into the appliance market, and it comes on the heels of similar moves by several other security vendors, including Network Associates Inc. […]

Sun Microsystems Inc. and Waveset Technologies Inc. are set to announce a new identity management solution that will tie human resources and other back-office systems into the IT security infrastructure. The goal: to help enterprises cut costs and maintain tighter control over who accesses their networks. The joint offering will be a standards-based solution built […]

A group of security vendors will give the first public demonstration of the new Service Provisioning Markup Language for identity management at the Burton Groups Catalyst Conference July 9. SPML is designed to enable companies to exchange user rights and resource information across heterogeneous networks. The language is an XML-based framework that also includes support […]

Our long national nightmare continues. Yet another variant of the persistent and malleable Sobig worm is on the loose. This one, dubbed Sobig.E, is distinct from its older brothers in that it hides inside zipped file attachments. Other than that, the worm is virtually identical to the other Sobig viruses that have been marauding across […]

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday issued a bulletin warning users of a flaw in a Windows 2000 Server component that could allow attackers to execute code on vulnerable machines. The flaw does not affect machines running Windows NT, XP or Windows Server 2003. The vulnerability lies in the DLL that Windows Media Services uses to log […]

In the latest of his periodic e-mail messages to Microsoft Corp. customers, Bill Gates on Tuesday said the amount of spam clogging corporate networks and users inboxes is “ridiculous” and detailed the companys plans to help stop the onslaught. Microsoft recently established a new internal group, the Anti-Spam Technology and Strategy Group, dedicated to finding […]

Officials at the CERT Coordination Center are scrambling to determine the source of a persistent leak that led to yet another unauthorized disclosure of a security vulnerability last week. A rogue security researcher, who goes by the mailing-list handle Hack4life, posted an advisory taken from CERT concerning a flaw in some PDF file readers. The […]

As traditional intrusion detection systems continue to come under criticism for inherent weaknesses, security vendors are introducing products with more advanced intrusion prevention and protection capabilities. Among them, Symantec Corp. this week plans to unveil a revised Symantec intrusion protection system. One of the main components of the new framework is the companys Host IDS […]