Category: News

While the Redwood City, Calif., company didn’t detail any specific product plans, it said Wednesday that it intends to add features such as identity management and application security to its Web security products and internal firewalls.

It will also add the ability to audit systems for regulatory compliance to its internal security products.

The strategy, outlined at Check Point’s annual industry analyst conference, is the latest move by a security company to offer a more integrated and easily managed approach to securing corporate information systems. Check Point’s announcement confirms that integrating security is a trend that companies will be forced to follow, said Jeff Wilson, an industry analyst with technology watcher Infonetics Research.

Check Point’s Kraynak said that the company hasn’t decided on whether to release Check Point-branded hardware devices as it ventures into Web security and internal security.

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In a letter to the Senate on Monday, Bush called the Council of Europe’s controversial treaty “an effective tool in the global effort to combat computer-related crime” and “the only multilateral treaty to address the problems of computer-related crime and electronic evidence gathering.”

Even though the United States is a nonvoting member of the Council of Europe, it has pressed hard for the cybercrime treaty as a way to establish international criminal standards related to copyright infringement, online fraud, child pornography and network intrusions.

The U.S. Department of Justice says the treaty will eliminate “procedural and jurisdictional obstacles that can delay or endanger international investigations.”

Civil libertarians have objected to the treaty ever since it became public in early 2000, arguing that it would endanger privacy rights and grant too much power to government investigators.

“It would require nations that participate in the treaty to adopt all sorts of intrusive surveillance measures and cooperate with other nations, even when the act that’s being investigated is not a crime in their home country.”

So far, according to the Council of Europe, only three countries–Albania, Croatia and Estonia–have ratified the treaty.

The treaty requires each participating nation to ban the distribution of software that is designed for the “purpose of committing” certain computer crimes, requires Internet providers to ensure “expeditious preservation of traffic data” upon request, and permits real-time wiretapping of Internet service providers.

An addition to the Council of Europe’s cybercrime treaty would ban “hate speech” from the Internet, a common prohibition in European nations that violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

The Justice Department said last year that it does not support the optional addition but still endorses the underlying treaty.

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The appliances, which are priced starting at $11,995, can detect and block both known and unknown attacks, said Internet Security Systems (ISS) executives, including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, worms, and Trojan horses.

A third simulation mode lets IT managers report what it would have blocked had it been enabled, giving security staff a chance to test the accuracy of the appliance before putting it inline.

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The Microsoft chairman outlined for Comdex attendees the software needed to access and share information across a variety of devices, and said security continues to be a pressing issue.

Microsoft demonstrated for the first time a forthcoming tool for bolstering the security of business networks, the Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004.

On the anti-spam front, Gates said Microsoft’s SmartScreen technology, already being used in the company’s MSN network, Hotmail service, and Outlook E-mail client, will be included “in the months ahead” in Exchange Server 2003.

More info: [url=http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16100844]http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16100844[/url]

Most notably, we witnessed the introduction of a potential major player in the intermediate- to senior-level: ISACA’s Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) certification.

In this semi-annual update to SearchSecurity’s certification landscape series, we introduce you to the many vendor-neutral security certifications available, and we re-evaluate the importance of several older elements, as you’ll read in part two.

This landscape features more security certifications than ever listed before — a total of 56, counting each GIAC credential.

While this article focuses on vendor-neutral certs, you can learn what is available by specific vendors in our accompanying article in this series.
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This month, a small startup called MagiQ Technologies Inc. began selling what appears to be the first commercially available system that uses individual photons to transfer the numeric keys that are widely used to encode and read secret documents.

Photons, discrete particles of energy, are so sensitive that if anyone tries to spy on their travel from one point to another, their behavior will change, tipping off the sender and recipient and invalidating the stolen code.

“There are really no ways (of) cracking this code,” said Lov Grover, a quantum computing researcher at Bell Laboratories who is not involved with MagiQ.

Called Navajo – a nod to the American Indian code specialists of World War II – MagiQ’s system consists of 19-inch black boxes that generate and read the signals over a fiber-optic line.

MagiQ (pronounced “magic,” with the “Q” for “quantum”) expects that with a cost of $50,000 to $100,000, Navajo will appeal to banks, insurers, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and other organizations that transmit sensitive information.

More info: [url=http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/7277751.htm]http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/7277751.htm[/url]