Linux Security Week - December 6th 2004

In every day life people do all sorts of things with all sorts of tools. But, do they get it right? Every tool has to be used in a certain manner, and if one doesnÕt know how to use it, the result can be damage. It's the same is with computer and network security tools. Before you can select the right tools for the job, you have to know what tools are available and learn how to use them.

Analysts, law enforcement agents and corporate IT managers focused on surprisingly nontechnical security solutions Tuesday as they discussed the latest risks to corporate networks as part of Ziff Davis Media's online "virtual" tradeshow on security. news/network-security/panelists-a-secure-network-needs-informed-workers

Stage 1: Network-capable initial analysis products for first responders, such as Guidance's EnCase Enterprise Edition and Technology Pathway's ProDiscover. These two products can acquire drive images remotely in a live environment, and their use eliminates the need for the Stage 2 tools. news/network-security/network-forensic-tools

To celebrate the launch of the new LinuxSecurity.com, we hosted a community chat event. It was held yesterday (December 1st 2004) at 4:00pm, and featured several prominent visionaries from the open source community including Jay Beale, Brian Hatch, Paul Vixie, Lance Spitzner, and Dave Wreski. The topics discussed ranged from authentication, patch management, honeypots, virtues of open source, SELinux, as well as others. We are planning another event to held in January; please send us your ideas! news/organizations-events/transcript-of-launch-chat

Simply connecting to the Internet -- and doing nothing else -- exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously. news/server-security/unprotected-pcs-can-be-hijacked-in-minutes

AirTight Networks, formerly Wibhu Technologies, announced on Tuesday the availability of SpectraGuard 2.0, the first Wi-Fi firewall to protect enterprise networks from wireless security threats. news/vendors-products/airtight-networks-announced-first-wi-fi-firewall

Protego Networks' line of PN-MARS security appliances helps network administrators manage and eliminate network attacks by combining intelligence, ContextCorrelation, SureVector analysis and AutoMitigate capability in a hardware-based solution that's easy to deploy. The appliance correlates data about security and network events from switches, routers, firewalls, intrusion-detection systems (IDSes), host logs and other hardware and software sources, and identifies incidents such as worms, Trojans, blended attacks, misconfigurations and internal abuse. news/vendors-products/there-is-intelligent-life-on-protegos-new-security-appliance-pn-mars

I'm ready to announce that Linux Netwosix 1.2 is ready. I have completely rebuilt , upgraded and secured the system. Please, read the Announcement Release. Is based on the powerful and reliable Kernel 2.6.9 and has been created for the requirements of every SysAdmin. Nepote contains the updated packages. You can download Netwosix from our Download Center or from one of our mirrors. Thank you! news/security-projects/linux-netwosix-12-jinko-is-released

Companies looking to make Web services available to business partners and their respective user bases must first figure out how to federate identity. Federated identity management refers to managing access so that only those who have a right to use specific services may do so.

Given the continual drive to secure today's enterprises, and in light of National Computer Security Day celebrated this week, Security Pipeline tapped Kathleen M. Coe, Symantec Corp.'s regional education director of education services, for insight on how to foster better user security behavior, as well as how to seed a strong corporate security culture companies require today.

All of us rely on information every day in just about every aspect of our life. As information is so important, we tend to rank it by its reliability. There are some people whose opinion we trust implicitly on certain matters. We accept as a matter of course that information is only valuable if it is accurate. The most valuable sources of information are those that are seen to be inherently reliable and easy to access.

Lycos Europe is offering a "screensaver that spams the spammers," using idle computer time to attack sites that have been blacklisted for abusive spamming practices. Monitoring of three of the targets housed on Chinese servers shows that two of the sites, bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz, have been knocked offline by the attack. A third target, rxmedherbals.info, has remained largely available, with intermittent outages. news/privacy/community-spam-fighting-effort-faces-heat

Lycos Europe appeared to have pulled a controversial anti-spam screensaver program from its site on Friday, after coming under fire from both security experts and the spammers themselves. news/privacy/follow-up-lycos-pulls-anti-spam-screensaver-from-site

The FBI's inability to recruit and keep the best available IT talent has proven to be one of the biggest challenges facing the government's Internet Crime Complaint Center (I3C), a senior official said Tuesday. news/government/fbis-cyber-crime-chief-relates-struggle-for-top-talent

As we celebrate the holiday season and prepare for the next round of legislation, a group of state and local governments has banded together to collect and distribute freely the costly software that normally runs taxpayers $100 billion annually. Called the Government Open Code Collaborative or GOCC.gov, this organization states that its members work together voluntarily to encourage "the sharing, at no cost, of computer code developed for and by government entities where the redistribution of this code is allowed". news/government/linux-in-government-the-government-open-code-collaborative

Recently, there's been increased criticism of the federal government's efforts to secure the Internet. The September departure of Amit Yoran from the Department of Homeland Security was widely cited as indicative of problems that run deep, not just through DHS, but the entire government. While everyone agrees there's much work to do, it's important to recognize the accomplishments of the past few years. news/government/is-cyberterrorism-being-thwarted

The author of the popular freeware hacking tool Nmap warned users this week that FBI agents are increasingly seeking access to information from the server logs of his download site, insecure.org. news/hackscracks/hacking-tool-reportedly-draws-fbi-subpoenas

Visitors to SCO's website this morning were treated to a rare moment of corporate self-awareness after hackers apparently replaced an image linking to the undoubtedly scintillating "Extending Legacy Applications and Databases to the Web and Wireless Devices with SCOx Web Services Substrate" with a graphic bearing the rather more promising "We own all your code - pay us all your money": news/hackscracks/sco-hacked-in-apparent-ip-protest

Automated attacks are coming from unexpected quarters--from across the globe, across town, and most creepily, even from across the hall. According to a recent report from anti-virus vendor Symantec, this year's 450 percent increase in the number of attacks on Windows machines is evidence that automation is proving as efficient for 21st-Century hackers as it did for 20th-Century manufacturers. news/hackscracks/bad-bad-bots

It's no surprise that the issue that topped the Wi-Fi agenda in 2004 was the same one that's plagued it almost from its introduction. Security, or rather "lack thereof," was an inherent problem in WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), the native security spec in the 802.11 IEEE standard.