Dennis Fisher

An attacker defaced a page on the U.S. Army Research Laboratorys Web site Friday with a message criticizing the military organization for supplying weapons to Israel. The attacker, going by the handle Rivver, posted a long, profanity-laced tirade against the Unites States government and its stance in the Middle East, the military and India. The […]

A day after shaking the security industry out of its summer doldrums by making three major acquisitions, Symantec Corp. officials said that for the time being they have no plans to meddle in how Recourse Technologies Inc., Riptech Inc. and SecurityFocus run their businesses. The companies respective technologies eventually will be integrated wherever makes sense, […]

A group of top government and private sector security experts on Wednesday will unveil a list of standard settings for Windows 2000 that they hope will help administrators avoid confusion and lock down their networks. Many government agencies, most notably the U.S. Department of Defense, will immediately mandate use of the settings and officials hope […]

One day after the Liberty Alliance Project released its first specifications for identity management, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Tuesday joined the rush to capitalize on the announcement, taking the wraps off what it called the first Liberty-enabled single sign-on solution. The Sun One Platform for Network Identity comprises two main products: the Identity Server version […]

Symantec Corp. on Wednesday announced the acquisitions of three companies, greatly expanding the companys product portfolio and making the Cupertino, Calif., vendor the dominant player in the security market. Symantec purchased Riptech Inc., Recourse Technologies Inc. and SecurityFocus for a total price of $355 million in cash. The company also announced revenue for the second […]

All the while maintaining that the government will not set IT security requirements for the private sector, top federal IT officials today said they expect such mandates will be imposed on federal agencies and that the same standards will also be used by industry. Heralding a private/public sector consensus on standard settings for Windows 2000 […]

McAfee.com Corp.s board on Tuesday again rejected an offer from its largest shareholder, security giant Network Associates Inc., to buy all of the companys outstanding shares. This is the second time the company has refused NAIs advances. A special committee of McAfee.coms board said NAIs offer of 0.90 shares of its stock for each share […]

The Liberty Alliance Project will unveil its specification for identity management this week, but members of the group and others said the entities involved in the Web services security standards effort have made little progress toward fusing their pet projects into a coherent platform. Despite some encouraging signs—such as Liberty founder Sun Microsystems Inc., of […]

As security industry insiders gather this week in San Francisco for the coming-out party for the Security Assertion Markup Language specification, vendors are rushing to include support for the proposed standard in their product lines. RSA Security Inc. this week will show off a SAML-compliant version of its ClearTrust Web access management software while announcing […]

After more than a year of development and confusion over its intentions, Hacktivismo last week unveiled an application designed to deliver censored content over the Internet. The application, once called Peek-a-Booty, is now known as Camera/Shy and is a browser-based steganography program that can hide data inside GIF images on any Web page. Camera/Shy is […]

An Internet security company on Monday announced that it had developed a tool to detect and disable a new anti-censorship application released at a hacker convention over the weekend. NetIQ Corp. officials said that they added protection against what they called a “hacker tool” in order to protect corporate customers from the hazards of having […]

Security researchers at @stake Inc. have found more than a dozen vulnerabilities in one of the most popular lines of voice-over-IP phones, some of which have consequences that reach well beyond just the telephony infrastructure. The researchers were able to gain remote administrative access to Pingtel Corp.s Xpressa SIP PX-1 phones, hijack calls to and […]