Dennis Fisher

WASHINGTON–Microsoft Corp. on Thursday joined a group of other vendors and privacy organizations in forming a new online privacy initiative designed to protect consumers from receiving unwanted or malicious e-mail messages. Known as Trusted Sender, the program is based on a set of best practices and is designed to give spam-weary consumers some options for […]

Hacktivismo, a subset of the famed Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group, will demonstrate its long-awaited Peekabooty software next month at a small peer-to-peer and network security conference in San Francisco. There has been a lot of discussion about what exactly Peekabooty is, but Hacktivismo has been quiet on the subject, preferring to let […]

Timing, as they say, is everything. As the furor over Oracle Corp.s new Unbreakable ad campaign grows, Application Security Inc. this week introduced a new version of its AppDetective, a security scanner designed to look for vulnerabilities in Oracle databases. Oracle, the Redwood Shores, Calif., database software maker, lately has been running a print advertising […]

A new mass-mailing worm hit the Internet on Sunday and has begun spreading rapidly. The new worm is known as Myparty.A and arrives as an e-mail with the subject line “New photos from my party!” The body of the message reads as follows: “Hello! My party…It was absolutely amazing! I have attached my web page […]

As the consolidation of struggling PKI technologies accelerates, even large backers of the security software are shelving internal products in favor of third-party pacts and a greater focus on public-key-infrastructure-based services. Indicative of this trend is a plan by IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., to diminish the role of its Tivoli SecureWay PKI solution over the […]

Struggling security vendor Baltimore Technologies plc. on Thursday announced the sale of its Content Technologies division for about $29 million. Clearswift Corp., a software company based in England, bought the division with a mix of cash, loan notes and Clearswift shares. Baltimore paid $992 million for Content Technologies in 2000. The sale is part of […]

RSA Security Inc. on Thursday reported a loss of $0.18 per share for the fourth quarter, compared with earnings of $1.70 per share in the same period in 2000. The company also announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission has begun a formal investigation into the companys change of accounting methods, which RSA announced in […]

Okena Inc. this week introduced its new integrated security suite, StormSystem, which combines its two previously released products. The new suite is based on StormWatch, which installs agents at various points of the network and collects data, which is in turn fed to the other components of StormSystem. The new release comprises StormWatch and StormFront, […]

IBM and VeriSign Inc., two of the largest players in the security market, have signed an agreement that calls for the companies to jointly develop new technologies and services as well as cooperate on marketing efforts. Under the terms of the partnership, which they announced Tuesday, the two companies will develop and market a new […]

Sales were down last quarter at PKI vendor Entrust Inc., but so was its loss. The Plano, Texas, company on Tuesday reported a net loss of 9 cents per share on sharply lower revenues of $28.4 million for the fourth quarter of 2001. In the same period a year ago, Entrust posted a net loss […]

In a dramatic example of the kind of damage that coordinated Internet attacks can cause, a British ISP Tuesday shut down its entire operation after a massive denial-of-service attack crippled its network for several days. Cloud Nine Communications Ltd. announced this morning that it had decided to close its operations after company executives determined they […]

As the launch of Microsoft Corp.s critical .Net Framework nears, Bill Gates is kicking off an all-out effort to repair the companys reputation for poor security and reliability. In an internal memo last week, Gates, chairman and chief software architect of the Redmond, Wash., company, articulated a broad-based plan to combat security and reliability problems […]