Data protection is never more vital than in the world of health care, where sensitive and life-impacting data is the cornerstone of medicine. More than 3,600 physicians in 26 states turn to our company for outsourced claims reimbursement management, making backup and recovery as critical as the reliable Linux platform.

Spooked at the thought of an Oracle-PeopleSoft combination to the point of considering playing white knight, IBM has now allied directly with PeopleSoft, getting it to promise to standardize its applications on IBM's WebSphere middleware.

Late Friday night, Scotland Yard released a statement officially confirming the arrest of a 20-year-old-man in connection with the hacking of Cisco's network that resulted in the theft of 800MB of its primary operating system. The code found its was onto servers in the Netherlands and Russia. News of the arrest heightens corporate security concerns.

VERITAS Software is celebrating its 15th anniversary by reflecting on the company's customer service initiative, and engineering bravado, both of which have allowed VERITAS to bring to 99% of Fortune 500 Companies its products. The company's next computing initiative is with grid computing. IT departments, according to VERITAS, can save tremendous resources through automation of systems.

One of most exciting areas to emerge in information security has been honeynets. These networks are designed to be compromised in order to capture all the tools and activities of the attackers. We had the opportunity to talk with members of the Honeynet Project, a nonprofit security research organization, and the group's founder, Lance Spitzner, about their latest book, Know Your Enemy: Learning About Security Threats, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley). We asked many questions and discovered some surprising truths about security. Read on for the rest of the story.

Microsoft has released an XP update with advanced security technologies and has urged Windows XP users to turn on Automatic Updates to get consistent security updates. However, IBM has told its users not to install the Windows XP update.

SYS-CON Media is inviting BEA, Borland, IBM, JBoss, JOnAS, Macromedia, Microsoft, Oracle, Orion, Sun, and Sybase to an 'Application Server Shoot-Out' at the upcoming Web Services Edge Conference & Expo, in Boston next February. The shootout will be a live competition aimed at finding out which app servers support the latest WS-I standards and how they compare in terms of how many transactions they can handle, how many lines of code they require, how they react to simulated network and hardware failures and a whole range of other metrics.

Dell on Thursday came in with solid numbers for its second quarter ended July 30 casting a long dark shadow over Hewlett-Packard's pre-announcement earlier in the day and underscoring the fact that HP's problems are of its own making, not an industry thing.

It's a problem as old as networked computing. Consider two applications. They negotiate a level of trust. How can that trust - or security context - be transferred to a third application, one that may exist in an entirely different security domain from the first?

The year-old Mozilla Foundation, home to the AOL-dispossessed mozilla.org and the next-generation Firefox alternate browser, is going to start paying cash bounties to people who identify and report security issues in its software. The AOL/Mitch Kapor-financed non-profit got oversight for the Mozilla browser, which has had its problems developing an active open source development community, after AOL cut its direct ties with the one-time Netscape unit.

'The Google search engine experienced slowness for a short period of time earlier today because of the MyDoom virus, which flooded major search engines with automated searches,' said a Google, Inc. statement yesterday. 'A small number of users and networks that have the MyDoom virus have been affected for a longer period of time,' it continued, adding that at no point was the Google Web site significantly impaired.

As reported here already yesterday, the Cabir virus - the world's first 'wireless worm' - does very little damage to the Series 60 phones it infects, apart from copying three files into a hidden directory and seriously reducing battery life. Further reports have confirmed yesterday's 'low risk' rating, both for home and corporate phone users.

Security vulnerabilities have been discovered in Oracle E-Business Suite. These vulnerabilities may allow a knowledgeable and malicious user to execute unauthorized procedures or SQL inside the database.

First chipmakers like Transmeta and AMD say they are working to make their microprocessors capable of protecting computers from virus and worm attacks, now Red Hat joins in - based on a prototype from Intel - and will start incorporating 'No eXecute' (NX) to help prevent buffer overflows.

Microsoft plans on training 500,000 people in security related matters over the next twelve months. In a relatively calm keynote by Ballmer standards, Microsoft's CEO was nevertheless upbeat about the future, saying: 'I think the next ten years will bring more positive change and innovation out of our industry than the last ten years.'

A recent increase in malicious activity on the Internet, including the development of attack tools and exploit code, has resulted in an automated attack against computer users in the form of a worm identified as 'W32.Sasser.worm' ('Sasser').

As anticipated Web-wide since last week, Google just filed for its IPO - a $2.7 billion offering that ranks as one of the largest ever. Last year's profits, according to IPO papers filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, were $105.5 million on revenue of $961.8 million, up from $9.6 million on revenue of $347.8 million in 2002.

Linux folks tend to have a better eye on security. I realize that's an overwhelmingly general and wide-sweeping statement, but that's my opinion. I've been working with Linux for a very long time, and most of the other users in the community tend to be highly technical and thus aware of many of the security concerns facing the networked world today.

In a speeech intended to serve us a wake-up call to anyone relying on the 'many eyes' that look at the Linux source code to quickly find any subversions, the CEO of Green Hills Software last week reminded his audience how UNIX's creator Ken Thompson installed a back door in the binary code of UNIX that automatically added his user name and password to every UNIX system - a secret he revealed only 14 years later.

'Security is as big and important a challenge as any our industry has ever tackled,' wrote Bill Gates in his latest 'Executive E-mail' to Microsoft's customers worldwide. 'It is not a case of simply fixing a few vulnerabilities and moving on. Reducing the impact of viruses and worms to an acceptable level requires fundamentally new thinking about software quality, continuous improvement in tools and processes, and ongoing investments in resilient new security technologies designed to block malicious or destructive software code before it can wreak havoc,' he continued.

In what may or may not be just a high-tech April Fool, Google says it's launching a free e-mail service, leveraging Google search technology to automatically organize and find messages, and coming with a free gigabyte of storage.

Since 1986, the environmental organization Greenpeace UK has relied on e-mail to support its campaigns, but its existing servers couldn't cope, so it has turned to a Linux-based SAN solution to guarantee that its environmental work can continue electronically and reliably.

The data exchanged in business-to-business (B2B) messages is often sensitive and requires protection. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) provides protection at the transport level through the confidentiality of data exchanged between two endpoints.

As we move from the 'Hello World' days of Web services toward development that can truly support the enterprise, there are some advanced functional requirements for Web services, including secure messaging, reliable messaging, and Web service policies. Since interoperability is the 'Holy Grail' of XML and Web services, we must maintain this interoperability while supporting such advanced Web service functionalities.

Symantec's CTO talks about comprehensive security and how today's IT organizations must address it.

Ineffectual corporate management has given a great gift to programmers, system administrators, and CIOs - endless corporate accounting scandals. Our federal government has not missed this scandalous behavior as they have passed an extraordinarily strong, far-reaching law to contend with financial fraud.

Concerns about security are cited as the single largest barrier to rapid Web services adoption. Yet most Web services today are fairly straightforward point-to-point integrations that can be securely implemented using only digital certificates and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.

At first glance, using open-source software for a firewall or other security application seems counterintuitive, even absurd. Why would a corporation use code that's available to anyone - hackers, cyber-terrorists, disgruntled employees - to protect their most vital information assets? Yet that's what's happening at places like Stanford University, EDS, and Los Alamos National Labs, to name but a few of the many organizations using open-source security software.

There are many concerns surrounding the security of Java applets and applications downloaded from the Internet. But because Java developers placed a lot of importance on security from the start, Java is the preferred technology for use in networked environments. When Java's security features are implemented properly, Java programs are safe and can be downloaded to your computer without any security risk.