Category: Product

Muglia, who indicated the software is an attempt to modernize the product and make it more proactive for protecting computers, said an early beta version has been made available to some customers, with a public beta planned for the fourth quarter.

ForeFront was the most notable unveiling to underscore the company’s new “People Ready Business” plan for empowering developers and IT professionals through new software.

Muglia said Microsoft plans to prepare for this wave with the ‘People Ready Business’ plan to helping developers manage complexity and achieve agility; protect information, control access; advance the business with IT solutions; and amplify the impact of people.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3612626

Microsoft will also debut the Antigen Enterprise Manager, a central console to control and report on the Antigen-branded defenses — but not third-party products — and will give away an add-on to Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 that monitors the products as well as notifies administrators and alerts users of malware and spam activity.

This is the second major security product unwrapped in the past week. Last Tuesday, Microsoft launched its consumer security subscription service, Windows Live OneCare.

Licari ticked off the new and improved features of the scanning components, suite, and console. Among them: support for server clusters, digitally-signed signature updates that have been vetted by Microsoft (which pulls them from the various scan engine providers), and stored configuration and update data for rapid restart when a server goes down.

Romania-based GeCAD, which was bought in 2003, also provided the core of Microsoft’s OneCare anti-virus protection. “This is the first time that we’ve used GeCAD in a corporate environment.”

Characterizing the Antigen messaging security family as “another option for companies,” Pawlak noted that some enterprises will turn to Microsoft for anti-virus and anti-spam scanning.

And then there’s the anti-Microsoft anxieties that some companies suffer. “Companies, especially very large companies, don’t want a single vendor providing both the OS, or in this case the OS of the mail server, as well as security,” MacDermott claimed.

http://www.informationweek.com/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=188702164

Several open-source security systems use it already, including OpenBSD, and the PaX and Exec Shield patches for Linux.

Certain attacks attempt to call Windows system functions, such as the “socket()” function in “wsock32.dll,” to open a network socket.

Randomization seems to have served open-source systems fairly well, said Russ Cooper, senior scientist at Cybertrust, a security vendor in Herndon, Va. “I suspect this will be the first thing looked for–something which tells you which of the locations has been chosen, or anything that provides you with a pointer,” Cooper said. Attackers could also create malicious software that tries to poke at all 256 memory locations.

http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=2480243-800b8f382c23b3407752a20ab3416b11-bf&s=5&fs=0

“If you look at the problems people want to solve, where the most pain is, it revolves around locating and remediating rogue APs and peer connections on the network,” says Brian de Haaff, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Network Chemistry.

The company is also planning to release quarterly information called the Network Chemistry Wireless Threat Index, based on information gathered by its products and the Wireless Vulnerabilities & Exploits (WVE) database it launched last year to catalog potential attacks on WLANs. He says it will be the industry’s first ongoing index of enterprise WLAN threats.

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3608381

Redmond-based Microsoft has previously said that its main focus for OneCare was the 70% of computer users who, according to Microsoft estimates, have no additional protection at all. But in an interview last week, Ryan Hamlin, general manager for the OneCare product, said the company also hopes to snag existing Symantec and McAfee customers.

“We’d love for those customers to use our product, and encourage them to, but there’s also 70% that don’t use anybody,” he said.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2006-05-31-microsoft-security_x.htm

Prior to last summer’s acquisition, there had been plenty of speculation about who would buy the startup, which offers software for enforcing security policies across a range of devices. Burton also confirmed, in response to a question from an analyst, that Symantec will make more of its email and messaging management products available through an “on demand” pricing model in the future. The vendor, he added, is also planning to launch a new version of its Enterprise Vault messaging management product later this year, which will offer file system enhancements. “A couple of years ago, we would have been talking about hackers seeking notoriety,” he said. In contrast, hackers are now looking to surreptitiously install software on corporate desktops for purposes such as keystroke logging, which can steal critical data.

Security, however, was not the only topic of discussion today, and Symantec execs confirmed that they are preparing a major new release of the NetBackup product they inherited when they bought storage vendor Veritas for $13.5 billion last year.

Away from the enterprise, Enrique Salem, Symantec’s group president for consumer products, explained that the vendor has two major new products up its sleeve: Norton 360 (code-named Genesis) and Norton Confidential (code-named Voyager).

Symantec execs avoided any discussion of their current lawsuit against Microsoft during today’s call.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=96125&WT.svl=news1_1