Paul F. Roberts

Michael Lynn, the security researcher who made international headlines in July for blowing the whistle about a major hole in Cisco Systems Inc.s software, has found employment at Ciscos chief rival, Juniper Networks Inc. A Juniper spokesman confirmed that Lynn works for the Sunnyvale, California, networking equipment maker, three months after he lost his job […]

Botnets are big business—at least according to authorities who announced the first U.S. case against an alleged computer hacker, who authorities believe netted $60,000 in cash and a BMW from a personal army of zombie computers. Federal authorities arrested a 20-year-old California man Thursday and charged him with running a network of 400,000 compromised computers […]

An equipment failure knocked out access to the Google search engine for Internet users on the West Coast of the United States early Thursday, a company spokesperson confirmed. Sporadic outages began around midnight Wednesday, Pacific time, and were the result of a piece of malfunctioning network hardware. The disruptions affected a “small fraction” of Google […]

Those frustrated with the mainstream medias coverage of the Iraq War have a new source of information on the conflict: raw video footage from the conflict released under an open-source “Creative Commons” license. Video footage from the Alive in Baghdad project has been released on video blogging site blip.tv. The video segments include the aftermath […]

New digital rights management technology shipping on music CDs by Sony Corp. of America/Bertelsmann AG artists employs stealthy, rootkit-style techniques to hide from users, according to a security expert. The new technology, which Sony has dubbed “sterile burning,” manipulates the Windows core processing center, or “kernel,” to make the DRM almost totally undetectable on Windows […]

For critics of Microsoft Corp.s software, 2003 was a very good year. The appearance of the Slammer and Blaster worms was evidence—if any were necessary—that things had gone badly awry at the Redmond, Wash., software giant. In articles over the days and weeks that followed, security experts and even the companys customers took Microsoft to […]

Microsoft Corp. is spending time and money—lots of it—courting people such as Tom Ferris, an independent security researcher who runs the Web site Security-Protocols.com. And for good reason. Ferris, who uses the online name “badpack3t,” has discovered a number of serious holes in the Redmond, Wash., companys products in recent months. These holes include vulnerabilities […]

Sana Security Inc. will release a desktop product next month that uses the companys behavioral malicious-code detection technology to find and remove spyware, keyloggers and other programs. Primary Response SafeConnect will complement the companys HIPS (host intrusion prevention system) product, Primary Response, on desktop systems and unmanaged network devices, company officials said. The new malware […]

Security experts from Internet Security Systems Inc. and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team are warning companies that the popular open-source Snort intrusion detection system technology contains a critical and easily exploitable hole that could be used to compromise vulnerable systems. ISS and U.S. CERT both issued advisories last week concerning a vulnerability in a […]

Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. finds itself with a formidable new competitor in the emerging area of network access control, as Juniper Networks Inc. has joined the fray with its first NAC offering. Juniper this week is unveiling its first dedicated NAC product, the Enterprise Infranet Controller, a hardware appliance that coordinates policy enforcement […]

Symantec Corp.s recent acquisitions of WholeSecurity Inc. and Sygate Inc. were seen as nice, complementary purchases for the security giant, but Symantec has ambitious plans for the companies technologies that could begin an overhaul of its core product lines. In the coming months, Symantec plans to integrate behavior-based malicious-code detection from WholeSecurity and endpoint compliance […]

Microsoft Corp., once known for its tightly controlled, if not opaque, security processes, recently invited a small number of hackers onto its Redmond, Wash., campus to crack the companys products for all to see. Blue Hat V2 teamed well-known “white hat” hackers with Microsoft employees in an attempt to break into and expose security weaknesses […]