Application Security: Features

CIOs in Australia and New Zealand are increasingly getting involved in the disaster recovery planning of their organisations, according to a new survey from Symantec.

Admit it: You are currently addicted to social networking. Your drug of choice might be Facebook or Twitter, or maybe Myspace or LinkedIn. Some of you are using all of the above, and using them hard, even IT security practitioners who know better.

Gaining attention for advocating a practical shift in how IT leaders think about security, the Consensus Audit Guidelines offer 20 controls to measure and monitor IT-system and network security. Though worries about increased cost often accompany any notion of improving security, John Gilligan, a consultant who developed the guidelines, says he implemented a subset of the controls when he was the Air Force CIO (from 2001 to 2005) and saved money on IT and risk management.

Sweden's Pirate Party won 7.13 percent of the vote in elections earlier this month. Its campaign for the respect of privacy, the reform of copyright law and the abolition of the patent system earned it a seat in the European Parliament, and it may yet gain another seat there, if planned changes to the number of seats attributed to each country win approval.

An overwhelming majority of Web sites promoted through spam are hosted in China at service providers that many times choose to ignore complaints and allow illegal activity, according to research from the University of Alabama.

Firewalls are a mature technology, right? Most companies have at least one, if not several. And since an established knowledge base exists to tap for issues and PCI DSS 1.1 and 1.2 are pretty clear cut, firewall management shouldn't be much of an issue, right? No one is going to suffer the brunt of managing the significant infrastructure change these regulations are bound to bring more than the security operations team, correct?

As German banks layer more security into their online banking procedures, security vendor Gemalto has launched a device it says makes completing transactions easier.

A team of journalists investigating the global electronic waste business has unearthed a security problem too. In a Ghana market, they bought a computer hard drive containing sensitive documents belonging to U.S. government contractor Northrop Grumman.

A new product from Phoenix Technologies, called Freeze, lets you use BlackBerry or iPhone Bluetooth to tell a PC that you're leaving the area and want it to lock up. When you return, Phoenix Freeze can also automatically unlock the machine so it's ready for you. However, it only works on Windows PCs, doesn't support 64-bit platforms, disables all other Bluetooth peripherals and seems to be a bit buggy for an official release. Phoenix Freeze for BlackBerry and iPhone

To the average IT security practitioner, the idea of disabling antivirus on new machines might seem blasphemous. After all, weren't we all told in IT Security 101 that everyone needs AV to keep the malware and data thieves at bay?