Stories by: Deborah Radcliff

First, the good news: e-businesses have moved quickly to combat phishers, consumers are learning to be more discerning, and vendors are stepping up with anti-phish tools and services.

Drowning in signature libraries and reactive event information that is of little value in locating attacks in progress, network security managers are fed up with signature-based intrusion-detection systems that have been the backbone of network security. Amid an ever-shrinking time gap between vulnerabilities and exploits, signature-matching IDS already has become obsolete, analysts and users say.

For the most part, hackers break into corporations for one reason: Status. "The hacking community is a strong meritocracy where status is determined by level of competence," says Dr. Max Kilger, a social psychologist for the Honeynet Project.