Dennis Fisher

VeriSign Inc. and IBM on Monday announced a set of security services designed to deliver access management and authentication technology, mainly to small and medium-sized businesses. The new offering comprises two services: the VeriSign Access Management Service and the IBM-VeriSign Trusted e-Business Integration Solution. The former is a fully managed service, hosted by VeriSign, that […]

A worldwide team of volunteers, using spare computing power, found the secret key for a message encrypted with the RC5-64 cipher late last month, winning a $10,000 prize and, they said, casting some doubt on the security of messages protected by the cipher. Distributed.net, a collection of more than 331,000 volunteers who lent their machines […]

As the bill authorizing the proposed Department of Homeland Security languishes in the Senate, government officials are discussing the possibility of informally consolidating federal information security agencies, according to sources familiar with the plan. The effort would take the place, at least temporarily, of more formal consolidation spelled out in the Homeland Security proposal, sources […]

A new vulnerability in the Apache Web server gives local users the ability to terminate processes or launch denial-of-service attacks against the server. The Apache Software Foundation has released an updated version of the affected server. The new release, 1.3.27, fixes the problem. The vulnerability is in the shared memory scoreboard, which is stored in […]

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday issued a raft of new patches, including one for a vulnerability in a component of Windows that gives an attacker the ability to run any code of choice on remote systems. The vulnerability lies in an ActiveX control found in the Windows HTML Help Facility. One of the functions exposed by […]

A Canadian company this week unveiled a new smart-card based authentication system capable of providing users with secure access to offices as well as their corporate networks. The system, from Ottawa-based CryptoCard Corp., comprises several components, including the CryptoAdmin 5.32 back-end server, the CryptoCard itself and separate PCMCIA and USB smart-card readers. Together, the system […]

Three days after its appearance, the Bugbear virus is still gaining momentum and has passed the venerable Klez virus as the most active in the past 24 hours. One company that tracks viruses, Message Labs Ltd., said it has seen more than 21,000 copies of Bugbear in the last day, nearly twice the number of […]

NEW YORK—Symantec Corp. on Tuesday unveiled a sweeping new security architecture as well as a new set of technologies designed to correlate and filter data gleaned from dozens of sources, including competitors products. Its a move that analysts say was a must for Symantec as the company continues to evolve. “This was absolutely necessary for […]

In his now-famous memo in January outlining Microsoft Corp.s new Trustworthy Computing initiative, Chairman Bill Gates praised Microsofts efforts in building patches and responding to security problems swiftly and decisively. But, Gates said, the new demands of Trustworthy Computing mean that what was good enough before would no longer make the grade. “Our responsiveness has […]

Although much of the hype surrounding Trustworthy Computing has subsided, Microsoft Corp. is quietly pushing the initiative ahead with behind-the-scenes efforts that include an extension of its developer training program and the possible development of additional stand-alone security products. But while customers give Microsoft credit for its recent efforts, some said the company has much […]

Over the last couple of years, as security vulnerability reports have piled up on products from such big vendors as Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., open-source advocates have snickered. If only those vendors would release their source code and let the open-source community at it, all their problems would go away, they […]

A new mass-mailing virus hit the Internet Monday, and unlike many others of its ilk, carries with it a payload that could do quite a bit of damage to vulnerable networks. Called Bugbear, the virus installs a Trojan on infected machines that is capable of logging users keystrokes, which could include passwords and other sensitive […]