Stories about: BMC

BMC Australia has won a deal with explosives, chemicals and paint making giant Orica to provide automated employee identity management to accelerate the productivity of new employees.

A unique demonstration showed user-centric identity software from major vendors, start-ups, one-woman projects and open source hackers all working in concert to replace passwords with validated identity-card access to Web-based resources.

Highly distributed organsations run their IT systems on a managed services provider (MSP) model -- supporting numbers of offices dispersed over a geographic area. Mark Scott, president of The Utility Company, says the best model for this combines advanced network monitoring with a franchising system, such as that used by Dunkin' Donuts. His company is an MSP serving a growing population of small companies -- "five-person PR firms, 30-person law offices" -- across North America from its Ottawa, Canada, base.

Online scams that lure online banking and e-commerce customers to phony Web sites and trick them into giving up sensitive account information have been a mainstay of online criminals for years. However, the increase in so-called spear-phishing attacks is new, as is the increasing sophistication of the software they use to penetrate enterprise networks.

As information security professionals, we tend to throw around certain terms when we talk about how information security should be implemented. Lately, when I've gone to meetings or written an e-mail that gives me a chance to evangelize about our security needs, my terms of preference have been "rule of least privilege" and "separation of duties."

IBM and Microsoft are set to turn over to a standards body a key set of Web services security specifications they have been developing for establishing trust and exchanging data between partners.

Open source has encompassed all areas of software applications and services, so there was little doubt that authentication would, sooner or later, be part of this fast growing movement. OpenLDAP, the open source directory project, has been with us for quite some time. But there's a new movement to create an authentication protocol, to standardize how authentication data is exchanged.

Symantec will buy Veritas Software in an all-stock transaction, the companies announced Thursday. Based on Wednesday's closing stock prices, the deal values Veritas at around US$13.5 billion, they said.

Lend Lease had antivirus software running on all of the gateways, e-mail servers and desktops that serve its 10,000 workers worldwide, but that wasn't enough to prevent a Blaster attack on Aug. 3, 2003. That incident prompted the global real estate management and financing company to begin a process that resulted in a sweeping revamp of its IT infrastructure.