Stories about: Brightmail

With so many types of malware stalking the Internet, companies pile on the e-mail defences. By Sue Hildreth and Michael Crawford

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.

CISOs are always pushing computer security policies. We asked three of them to forget the policies and show us how they handle security on their own home systems.

Symantec Chief Executive Officer John Thompson says his company's US$13.5 billion acquisition of Veritas Software is moving ahead, with the merged company set to offer enterprises a "holistic" grouping of integrated products to more easily deal with issues of security, data backup, and compliance.

Symantec has issued patches to fix a "high impact" security hole that affects almost every product it currently sells.

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.

Security software company Symantec is negotiating to buy storage software vendor Veritas Software for more than US$13 billion, according to a report published Tuesday by The New York Times.

Network security continues to be a fast-growing market of keen interest to investors. Core network connectivity traditionally has fallen under the purview of hardware manufacturers such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, whereas companies such as Symantec and McAfee (formerly Network Associates) generally have been considered the primary sources of security products. However, this long-established boundary separating networking and security is rapidly blurring and might soon disappear entirely.

Network Associates and Symantec long to be more than anti-virus vendors. The rivals want to be one-stop security shops where businesses buy everything from intrusion prevention to spam control to firewalls.

In April, nearly two-thirds of e-mails sent were spam.