Stories about: Opus One

A look at the all time greatest controversies in the history of the networking industry.

Network access control stands out as one of the most promising security technologies, but it also is one of the most misunderstood. That's in part because vendors want in on the NAC buzz and are clamoring for attention, despite selling products that are only peripheral. This raises problems for companies that want to consider NAC but don't have a solid sense of what it is, what it might do for them and what kind of investment it requires.

The most familiar names in network security are neither vendors nor geeks: Try Alice and Bob.

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.