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Enterprise
Californias highest court ruled Monday that a fired Intel employee did not trespass on the companys e-mail servers when he inundated its employees with electronic complaints. In the 4-3 decision the California Supreme Court overturned a lower court injunction that had barred Kourosh Kenneth Hamidi from e-mailing workers at his former employer. A lower court had considered Hamidi to be trespassing on the chipmakers servers, just as if somebody were squatting on a piece of physical private property.
Attacking one of the key problems early adopters have had with IPv6, Cisco plans to beef up security, adding support for stateful packet filtering of IPv6 traffic to its software and hardware firewall products in the first half of next year. The company provided that statement of direction at the North American IPv6 Global Summit, held this week in San Diego. Cisco demonstrated the filtering capability in its IOS firewall at the conference, said Patrick Grossetete, Cisco IOS IPv6 product manager, in an interview from the conference.
America Online on Monday announced upgrades to its enterprise messaging products, adding the ability to encrypt messages, files, and chat sessions over its network, which can then be logged and audited. The encryption capabilities are incorporated into the new 5.2 version of AOLs Instant Messenger client and into its AIM Enterprise Gateway 2.0. A study released earlier this month by Radicati Group predicted that corporate IM accounts would reach 60 million in 2003 and grow to 349 million by 2007.
Viruses
Virus writing and high-profile infections have been on the rise this year, with significant activity over the past couple of months in particular. Figures from Sophos reveal the first six months of 2003 have seen a 17.5 percent increase in virus activity over the same period last year — and this shows no sign of abating. “Bugbear.B entered the frame late, but nevertheless it has generated more enquiries than any other virus in the last six months,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “By morphing its contents every time it forwards itself — and by spoofing the e-mail address of the person who sent the virus — Bugbear-B has been the most prevalent and irritating virus so far this year,” he added. Bugbear accounted for 11.6 percent of all virus reports in 2003.
Secure Programming
OReilly & Associates has published Secure Coding: Principles & Practices to help programmers write secure code. Co-author Kenneth R. van Wyk said, “Secure software doesnt happen by accident, the vast majority of security flaws being announced today are entirely avoidable.” The book makes the case that developers must be vigilant throughout the entire code lifecycle, through architecture, design, implementation, testing, and operations. The book may be purchased ($29.95 US, $46.95 CA) at any of numerous online bookstores via links at the books home page.