NSA

DARPA held a conference this week explicitly asking hackers to show up and share ideas of how to secure .gov and .mil systems. It may not have gotten many ideas, but did plant a few seeds with more than just hackers.

NSA, the intelligence agency responsible for eavesdropping on foreign conversations and digital communications, is at Black Hat to recruite hackers to crack the "hardest problems," and is willing to put up with people who don't wear crisp white shirts every day to get them.

The National Security Agency wants to use commercially-built security products and the latest virtualization software. But the slow pace of getting products certified through NSA channels and the lightening fast pace of change in the IT industry is causing national-security heartburn.

The Washington Post will report in today's edition of the newspaper that the National Security Agency (NSA) and Google are finalizing an agreement whereby the NSA would analyze the now-famous hack attack in China.

Programmers from China and Russia have dominated the TopCoder Open, an annual international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components.

In surveys of senior-level IT managers, security is consistently one of the top five concerns, along, specifically, with security related to the hot technology of the moment. Most recently the security of virtual servers and virtualized infrastructures ranked near the top of the list -- and rightly so, according to analysts.

Speaking at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, NSA Director Lieutenant General Keith Alexander said that any effort to keep U.S. and government networks safe would be a group effort, rather than a centrally managed operation.

Rod Beckstrom, director of the National Cybersecurity Center, has resigned his position effective March 13, complaining about the large role of the National Security Agency (NSA) in a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.