Stories about: Vigilance

The proliferation and popularity of collaborative Web 2.0 sites – there are around 250,000 new registrations to Facebook everyday – has changed the threat landscape and the way businesses need to think about security. Each year, newer technologies and weapons are being unleashed to leave Web users surprised, annoyed and at greater risk.‘Whaling’ or ‘spear phishing’, is one such threat and refers to phishing scams which specifically target high-worth individuals.

Art Coviello, President of RSA and Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation, talks to Computerworld's Siobhan Chapman about enterprise threats, IT security spend and the rising threat posed by social networks.

The call to Bob Bailey, an IT executive with a major US government contractor, came on an otherwise ordinary day in October 2003. "Why are you attacking us?" demanded the caller, an IT leader with a Silicon Valley manufacturer. He wanted to know why Bailey's company had launched a denial-of-service attack against his network

Hackers appear to have stepped up their efforts to trick corporate executives into downloading malicious software programs that can steal company data over the past year, according to new data released Monday.

Internet Security Systems (ISS) and MessageLabs released a synopsys of 2006 security trends yesterday, with both companies revealing a marked increase in spam throughout the year.

If you have given your trusted employees and key contractors remote access to your network via a client virtual private network (VPN), congratulations! By now, you have seen the productivity and cost benefits from allowing collaboration that surmounts geographical separation.

The old network security model -- perimeter defense -- was a lot like the old physical security model: Put your assets in a secure location, build a wall and use a gate to control who goes in and out. Many today say the perimeter model is obsolete; some even say the perimeter should be removed altogether. While today it's critical to understand the shortcomings of the castle-and-moat model, CSOs should be a long way from tossing their firewalls altogether.

These long-standing logs can help you monitor your networks and employees. So before you invest in a new kind of data collection system, review your log files. The information you want might already be in there.

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.

Cash machines froze. Airlines and hospitals dusted off paper forms to schedule reservations and track patients. This was the scene on Jan. 25, 2003, shortly after the Slammer worm appeared and quickly began spreading around the world, flooding computer networks with worm-generated traffic and knocking vital database servers offline.