Paul F. Roberts

SAN JOSE, Calif.—When Bill Gates stood before an audience of IT security experts at the RSA Conference Feb. 14 and declared that “passwords dont cut it,” many in the audience took it as evidence of another sea change in the technology market and a sign that strong authentication has finally arrived. Major announcements from Microsoft, […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Secure tokens and strong authentication were all the rage here at this weeks RSA Conference, but many experts said they believe nascent anti-fraud services will be equally important in securing online transactions in the months and years to come. Major technology vendors, including RSA Security, Microsoft, VeriSign and IBM, are investing in technology […]

Users of the Macintosh operating system received a rare security warning on Feb. 16 after samples of an Internet worm that targets the OS X operating system was identified by anti-virus companies. OSX.Leap.A spreads over the iChat instant messaging program and can stop infected Mac applications from launching, according to warnings from iDefense and Symantec. […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Senior cyber-security officials defended the U.S. governments continued reliance on private sector initiatives to improve the security of the nations infrastructure, even as some experts raised questions about its effectiveness. Current and former officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and the Federal Aviation Administration said that federal government was […]

Security products that perform health checks on desktop and laptop computers will be in abundance at this weeks RSA Conference. But industry leaders Cisco Systems and Microsoft remain mum about a long-promised integration of their dominant network access control architectures, leaving IT managers wondering whether to go with one of the solutions that is already […]

Qualys on Feb. 13 announced a new on-site vulnerability management and policy compliance service: Qualys @Customer. The new service allows Qualys customers to host installations of the QualysGuard vulnerability management service and retain local control of security data. The news comes as Qualys makes plans for a major expansion of its SAAS (software as a […]

U.S. Government officials and private sector representatives held a press conference the afternoon of Feb. 10 to declare the Cyber Storm digital war game exercise a success. The governments first full-scale exercise to test federal, state and local response to a cyber-attack improved coordination between the public and private sectors and government agencies, according to […]

A 20-year-old California man was indicted in Seattle Feb. 10 on charges that he used a computer “bot” network to cause computer malfunctions at Seattles Northwest Hospital in January of 2005. Christopher Maxwell, of Vacaville, Calif., was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of conspiracy to cause damage to a protected computer […]

Security and communications company VeriSign is buying Snapcentric, a maker of transaction monitoring software that can spot fraud, phishing attacks and other threats, according to a company executive. Details of the purchase were still being resolved late Feb. 8, and VeriSign said it plans to disclose details of the purchase Feb. 9. The company said […]

Microsoft on Feb. 9 issued preview versions of its Internet Security and Acceleration Server, Client Protection and Antigen products. The company announced that it is making early versions of the products available to certain customers for testing, citing demand for new tools to shore up security branch office environments and reduce the complexity of managing […]