Stories by: Cara Garretson

These forward-thinking IT managers are working at dismantling the stereotype of the risk-averse security professional-cum-business foe. How? By showing business colleagues they understand company operations and appreciate corporate goals.

The rapid consolidation in the anti-data leakage market in the past year is enough to make an IT manager's head spin: This segment of the security sector ballooned to include dozens of start-ups, then even more quickly dwindled down to a few independent companies as larger vendors cherry-picked smaller ones to add data leakage to their own product portfolios.

Those who commit cybercrime know they need to stay on the cutting edge of technology to come up with new and different ways to swindle people. Luckily, the good guys are also spending time in research labs developing ways to thwart the latest tricks employed by spammers, phishers and other criminals.

As young adults who grew up on e-mail and online chat enter the workforce, they bring with them a set of newer technologies designed for rapid-fire communication and workplace personalization. Much of this technology may represent better, faster ways of getting a job done, but it also introduces a new round of security threats for corporate networks; and the decision to allow them or not must be made carefully.

In the month of August to date, there have been 38 malicious-code attacks on instant-messaging networks, double the number experienced in July.

Spammers are jumping on the success of The Simpsons Movie to trick e-mail users into validating their addresses, so they can then send them more spam.

Following his keynote speech at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Washington, D.C., this week, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst John Pescatore answered a few questions from Vic Wheatman, managing vice president at Gartner.

Remember when thumb sucking was considered an innocent activity, except that if you did it as a young child you might need braces as a teen? Today you'd need a lot more than a mouthful of metal to protect from thumb sucking.

On Monday at 6 a.m., Dave DeWalt stood in front of McAfee's Plano, Texas, offices to greet employees with coffee, doughnuts and a handshake. "They were wondering, 'Who's the guy in the suit?'" says the former EMC vice president who became McAfee's CEO on April 2.

Imagine a natural disaster the likes of Hurricane Katrina or a terrorist attack on a major city wipes out business operations. In the mad dash to get back online as quickly as possible, security protocols and procedures take a back seat to regaining business continuity.