Stories about: Oracle

The late Internet pioneer Jon Postel (1943-1998), among others, developed the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) in 1982 that is still used today for Internet mail communications. But I'm sure Postel would be turning over in his grave if he could see the abuse that his protocol is subject to today.

IBM upgraded its identity management capabilities with tools to help customers manage user access to sensitive information, the company said Wednesday.

Faced with looming regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Craig Shumard, chief information security officer for healthcare provider Cigna, knew he needed better tools for role-based access control.

As long as IT managers encrypt data using only one vendor's products, the keys used to decrypt that data can be relatively easy to manage. But it will likely become much more complicated as more vendors build encryption into more and different types of storage devices, each with their own key management system, and as users need to move encrypted data among devices for disaster recovery, legal discovery or simply everyday business communications.

Microsoft is offering updates on the progress of interoperability initiatives, including the Interoperability Executive Customer Council (IEC) and the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA).

New companies have to be brash to enter the network security market, given that the industry has witnessed an explosion in creativity over the past five years and considering that big players such as Microsoft and IBM increasingly are throwing their weight around in security.

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.

As a Microsoft employee, I try to avoid writing on areas that blatantly promote Microsoft. However, I think this question is generic enough to involve Microsoft in the discussion: Can IP addresses ever be used for statistical analysis of malicious Web sites?

For managers of enterprise datacenters, the endless stream of security patches from Microsoft, Oracle, and other software vendors (not to mention open source projects) has been a prime source of frustration. For Blue Lane Technologies, it has provided a golden opportunity.

[[ArtId:1592845665|Last month]], Stefan Esser, an independent security consultant and a founder of both the Hardened-PHP Project and PHP Security Response Team (which he has since left), launched his Month of PHP Bugs as a way of improving the security of PHP by outing flaws in its source code.