Security

Trying to write a policy to dictate physical access rules for your IT assets? You may want to use this policy, from the University of Texas, to guide you. (Policy is in PDF format.)

Even if an attacker manages to enter your facilities surreptitiously, he should still run in to inner lines of defense when trying to access your protected data. The following list offers some tips on what you can do to physically protect your network.

This research paper goes into a good bit of detail on designing a facility that can resist physical intruders. It describes an ideal situation and also helps you make the best of the facility you're already in. (Paper is in PDF format.)

While organizations around the world scrambled this week to disinfect and patch systems that had been hit by the dangerous new W32.Blaster Internet worm, the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center could sit back and relax. Having been slammed by Slammer in January, the hospital got vigilent about patching.

Security experts on Monday warned of the first self-propagating virus to take advantage of a widespread vulnerability reported last month in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating systems.

Zone Labs Inc. is jumping into the instant messaging (IM) security fray, but unlike most vendors Zone Labs will first target consumers and wants to secure IM on the desktop instead of the server.

The University of California at Berkeley is in the midst of a crippling attack against its computer network. The flaw that attackers are exploiting is a recently discovered Microsoft Windows vulnerability - and even though a patch is available, it appears that many university computers are unpatched. Read on for a cautionary tale on keeping your security up to date.

Even the most safety-conscious of computer users often store sensitive data on Palm OS and Pocket PC devices that can be easily misused if those devices are lost or stolen. A recent report outlined just how insecure these devices can be.

Can revealing the nature of computer vulnerabilities help make the Internet more secure? Many security researchers believe so; they say that making vulnerabilities public can open the task of fixing those holes to the programming community at large, can help consumers decide which products are safest, and can force the hand of vendors who are dithering on a writing a patch. Many vendors, on the other hand, decry such moves as "information anarchy," and say that security researchers are looking for glory or profit when they release such information. The links here offer a high-level overview of this controversy, which is almost as old as the Internet itself.