Category: Product

The TPM is commonly used in enterprise workstations and laptop computers to enable security features and securely store encryption keys. Apple also uses the chip to limit the OS X operating system to Mac hardware, preventing consumers from running it on generic x86 computers.

Privacy advocates have criticised the chips because they could potentially be used to enforce digital rights management technology and prevent users from accessing certain applications or services.

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Having a centrally managed environment that will automatically dig down into the layers of the network and sift out the critical information and send alerts is crucial to protecting network infrastructure against current and future threats, said Bob Cohen, president and CEO of CG Atlantic, a New York-based security solution provider.

http://www.securitypipeline.com/news/184419768;jsessionid=AWJ3C5O30AOSKQSNDBOCKHSCJUMEKJVN

Check Point, an Israeli company best known for its firewall technology that defends networks against Internet attacks, announced in October that it had signed a deal to buy Sourcefire, which makes security appliances for protecting a corporation’s internal networks.

The deal had been under scrutiny since February by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, a panel made up of representatives from a dozen government agencies tasked with investigating foreign investments in U.S. companies that could affect national security.

Check Point had committed to an all out effort to lobby the committee for approval, but the process fell afoul of international politics following the public outcry over the failure of CFIUS to further investigate a proposed deal that would have given a Middle Eastern company control over six major U.S. ports. The proposed Check Point acquisition was under initial review by the U.S. Treasury-led CFIUS, when the Associated Press broke the news that United Arab Emirates-based Dubai World Ports planned to close a deal which would have given the company responsibility for security at six major U.S. ports.

Congress established CFIUS under the U.S. Treasury Department in 1988, when fears of growing Japanese ownership of U.S. companies caused legislators to pass the Exon-Florio Act.

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For the indicator to move higher, there has to be a notable threat increase, Cole said. Similarly, when an unusual number of Trojan horses or phishing e-mails are being spammed, the e-mail threat level will rise to medium, Cole said.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6043873.html

Currently, it’s possible to package updates in SMS format, but it’s cumbersome, Microsoft said. Giving customers access to numerous catalogs from within the SMS console will slash the time it takes to find updates, repackage them and then deploy and manage them, the company said.

“The news that SMS will support non-Microsoft products is long overdue,” said Paul Freeman, CEO of Coast Solutions Group, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider. “This has always been a major selling point against SMS. Customers will be very interested in this, as will [ISV competitor] Altiris, since [heterogeneous support] is something that they have used to differentiate themselves from SMS in the market.”

SMS 2003 R2 also includes an Enterprise Scan Tool for Vulnerability Assessment, which checks desktops and servers for software configuration errors and other vulnerabilities, Microsoft said.

Also on Monday, Microsoft announced that it released SMS 2003 Service Pack 2 earlier this month. SP2 offers enhanced virtualization support and enables Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to function as the database engine for SMS.

Microsoft also kicked off a promotion that enables SMS 2.0 customers to upgrade to SMS 2003 at a 30 percent discount on the license price if purchased with Software Assurance. The support life cycle for SMS 2.0 ends in March.

Many partners are focused on the SMS 2003 R2 release and its ITCU tool, which will enable IT administrators and partners to simply point and click to bring important patches and updates from ISVs and partners into the SMS console. Citrix Systems, for instance, has pledged to support ITCU.

“Many customers do not just use Windows. They have other platforms–thousands of Windows systems and just as many Unix or derivatives of Unix like Linux. They want to streamline administration and want the same administrators to manage all platforms,” said Bob Tedesco, CTO of Resolute, a Microsoft partner in Bellevue, Wash. “So having the same Microsoft tools do it all is in line with that.”

http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=180205417

“With this announcement, we’ll have more security features in our Sun Java Web Server,” said Brian Leonard, Sun’s marketing director of Web tier products. Sun Java System Web Server 7.0, with its support for ECC, is expected to be released in July, Leonard said.

The company is also expected to announce plans next week to change the way it delivers security to organisations and agencies that deal with highly sensitive information, said Chris Ratcliffe, director of Sun’s Solaris marketing. Sun plans to introduce its Solaris Trusted Extensions, which encompasses the remaining 15 percent of the security features left out in Solaris 10. He noted organisations that are mandated to use higher levels of security will likely be the ones to subscribe to the Trusted Extensions support service.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Sun_to_unveil_security_offerings/0,2000061733,39237991,00.htm