Category: News

Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to unveil two new security services next week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, both of which are designed to help customers resist potential and ongoing attacks.

HP’s new Active Countermeasures service will be a two-tiered vulnerability assessment that pulls in data on new threats from the CERT Coordination Center, ISA and other sources. The system will rank the threats according to their probability of exploitation and risk, then perform scheduled scans of the customer network, searching for machines that are vulnerable to any of the high-risk threats. HP will write its own exploits for new flaws and then use the code to access each machine and install the patch.

HP’s other new offering is called the Virus Throttler, and is designed to limit the damage done by viruses and worms after they hit a network.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1533447,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

First, the agreeable part: Everyone—the government, industry and consumers—agrees that the government should help protect the critical infrastructure that allows our economy to function, and everyone agrees that particular attention should be directed to the protection of water supplies, power grids and gas lines.

Beyond that point, however, the harmony fades. Industry has two big gripes with the new law. First, a meddlesome federal government could require industry to cough up billions of dollars for security measures that may or may not be needed. And second, industry doesn’t trust the government to keep a secret.

There is, of course, good reason for that: The Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to release to the public all documents containing information about public health risks and general safety, and the data demanded by the new act would certainly qualify as such. So it’s not surprising that industry spokespeople have been making a lot noise about the dangers of such information falling into the hands of the wrong people, such as terrorists, not to mention investigative reporters or consumer advocacy groups.

Ever innovative, the DHS has found a way to encourage business to share the kind of information that it would not otherwise share: It simply trumped the Freedom of Information Act. The new law now contains a provision that grants the Department of Homeland Security the authority to exempt any information that it deems “protected” from the reaches of FOIA. That provision, of course, is making consumer advocates and environmentalists crazy. They point out that the law creates a convenient method for industry to bury damaging information about such things as plant safety and environmental hazards. All a polluter has to do, they say, is persuade an industry-friendly DHS that certain information should be “protected,” and that information will be off-limits to journalists, stock holders and even plaintiffs in civil lawsuits.

According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, some critics claim that the law could conceivably be used to prosecute whistle-blowers who reveal problems involving any part of a company’s critical infrastructure. The DHS admits that the law is not perfect. If it were, the agency would not be asking the public for comments about it for the next 90 days. But the DHS leaders do want comments. Is there a way to protect the country’s critical infrastructure and keep everybody happy?

http://comment.cio.com/soundoff/021904.html

With the announcement that conformance to the Basel II Capital Accord must be achieved by 2006, the banking industry now has a defined timeline for regulatory compliance.

Though these devices support standard security options and protocols useful to thwart common attacks (ciphering, authentication, etc), many kinds of attacks are still possible but are dependant on the real level of security present and the skill of the attacker.

Sometimes, even in companies, blackhat people find open networks with poor or no security in place. Threats come through the external physical barriers (from a parking lot, walking down the street, through windows) or inside your own environment (via zealous network seekers with PDAs or laptops, wireless cards and scanning software).

1.0 Introduction to wireless honeypots
The Internet is full of excellent resources that describe wireless technologies, wireless threats, wireless security offerings and honeypot technologies.

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1761

Once it infects target machines the worm attempts to search and destroy any traces of MyDoom infection – before downloading patches for the Microsoft vulnerability it used to infect the system in the first place.

As if that little lot wasn’t enough, today also saw the arrival of a Trojan, called Mitglieder-H, with the ability to spread to computers infected with the MyDoom-A worm.

http://www.it-analysis.com/article.php?articleid=11669

In a letter to William Donaldson, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, 11 organizations of companies – saying they represented 100,000 European companies including more than 100 whose securities are traded in the United States, asked for changes that would make it easier for them to stop being registered with the SEC.

While some European companies are “quite satisfied with their experience in the U.S. market,” others have concluded that the costs are not worth the benefits, said the letter, signed by business leaders including Alain Joly, the president of the European Association for Listed Companies and the chairman of the supervisory board of Air Liquide.

The rule he referred to, whose implementation was delayed until 2005 for foreign companies, requires corporate executives to certify that internal financial controls are adequate, and requires outside auditors to certify that the management’s conclusions are accurate.

Greene, a former SEC general counsel, said many companies were also concerned about bars on company loans to executives. A company that no longer values a U.S. listing can easily delist from the exchange, Greene said.

A company remains subject to the securities laws unless it can show that it has fewer than 300 American investors. To do that, it must conduct research to determine its actual shareholders, regardless of whether those holders bought the shares in America or overseas.

The European companies’ proposal would not apply to Japanese or other overseas companies because it assumes the European companies would follow new International Accounting standards, as they are expected to do beginning in 2005, although some European companies are resisting the international rule on accounting for derivatives. But many have found that American institutional investors are willing to buy shares overseas, wherever the most liquidity is. And companies that are not listed in the United States can sell securities there in private offerings, under an SEC rule known as 144A, so long as the buyers are institutional investors.

http://www.srimedia.com/artman/publish/article_753.shtml