One day people will realise that telling employees to take the security of their company’s network seriously is an exercise in futility. It’s like asking motorists not to speed in their cars. If cars weren’t intended to cruise at...

On the very day Watchguard decided to trumpet its good worldwide sales figures in the UTM (unified threat management) market, its most important European reseller, Wick Hill, was making very positive noises to journalists about a small French UTM...

Self-proclaimed firewall guru (our term) and CSO of Tenable Security Inc, Marcus Ranum, has alerted us to his “Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security”, attracting attention from Slashdot, as well as some inevitable ire. “These dumb ideas are the...

It could be described as a “vanity hire” if he weren’t also one the industry’s most interesting and prestigious names. Having whiled away a decade at MCI WorldCom – he likes to work for interesting companies in interesting times...

Not a week goes past nowadays without some company or other launching yet another “UTM” appliance. The latest is Zyxel, which this week announced the ZyWall Unified Threat Management series. UTM stands for “Unified Threat management”, a term dreamt...

You’ve got to admire Ed Gibson, Microsoft’s recently-appointed UK chief security advisor. He was brave enough to stand up at a conference and admit that he had been conned by the rogue dialling scam that in the last couple...

In security, there are three types of unpleasant experience. You can be attacked and compromised, you can be attacked and severely compromised, and you can be given the once over by a cryptologist. The latest example of the latter...

You expect Trojans to show us technical innovation and maliciousness, not theological mentoring. That was until the " target="_blank">Yusufali-A Trojan (so named by security vendor Sophos), picked up in recent days by anti-virus companies. Once it has infected a...

When did the Nigerian advance fee email scam (aka “419 fraud”) first appear? Nobody can say for certain. In Internet time, it probably goes back to the mid-1990s, in letter form, perhaps as far as the 1970s. In the...

There are now so many urban legends, it’s getting hard to know whether some of these stories might be true after all. And then there are the legends that certain perfectly true stories are actually urban legends. One that...