Dennis Fisher

Despite months of speculation and discussion about the U.S. governments cyber-warfare capabilities, security and defense experts say there is little chance the military will use such weapons in the war against Iraq. While government agents have the tools and expertise to launch crippling attacks on Iraqi computer networks, telecommunications systems and other vital pieces of […]

Eighteen thousand computers tied together in less than 24 hours; a virtual army of machines, standing ready to do the will of their new master. Think of the possibilities that kind of processing power holds: cracking immense encryption keys or helping to sequence the human genome or even aiding the search for transmissions from extraterrestrials. […]

A pro-American hacker on Thursday defaced the Web site of the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel. The incident caps off a tumultuous week for the channel, one in which its site was the target of a denial-of-service of attack and has been largely unavailable for hours at a time. The defacement was done by a hacker […]

Security vendor Network Associates Inc. plans to restate three years of earnings after investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice turned up some information that casts doubt on the validity of the previously stated numbers. Company executives said Wednesday that they will revise the earnings statements for 1998, 1999 and […]

The new English-language Web site of controversial Qatar-based satellite news channel Al-Jazeera was knocked off-line Tuesday by what may have been a denial-of-service attack. The site was just launched Monday and was put together rather quickly in order to deliver news on the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. However, the site became overloaded very soon after […]

A Danish security company, angry over what it perceives as censorship on several popular mailing lists, is launching “a revolution to remove SecurityFocus and CERT from power.” At present, the revolution consists of a new mailing list that will aggregate vulnerability advisories and other security-related reports from a variety of sources. Employees of Secunia Ltd. […]

Government officials and private organizations alike are reviewing their vulnerability disclosure processes after several incidents over the past 10 days exposed major shortcomings in the way new bugs are handled. The most dramatic case for change came early last week when an anonymous member of a security mailing list posted three unpublished vulnerability advisories. None […]

Security experts say the latest Windows vulnerability revealed last week by Microsoft Corp. has already been used by crackers to attack at least one machine belonging to the U.S. Army. And, it turns out, the flaw used to attack the Web server was discovered not by Microsoft or independent researchers but by the attacker himself. […]

Now that the federal government has shown its cards on the issue of Internet security, a newly formed task force of security company executives is planning a response it hopes will make measurable progress in the effort to improve computer security. The CEO Cybersecurity Task Force by the end of this year will release a […]

Hoping to rally support for its nascent integrated security effort, Symantec Corp. on Monday unveiled a new partner program that provides technical assistance for security vendors who commit to integrating their products with Symantecs. The Symantec Technology Partner Program is designed to create an ecosystem of vendors around the companys Enterprise Security Architecture and Security […]