Stories by Ellen Messmer

Is Snort, the 12-year-old open-source intrusion detection and prevention system, dead?

IBM this week rolled out a security device it says will protect online banking and keep cyber-criminals from being able to make fraudulent funds transfer even from a compromised PC.

The good, the bad and the ugly of data-loss prevention tools and technologies got a solid once over from Gartner analyst Eric Ouellet, who spared no punches during his presentation on the topic during the first day of Gartner's Security and Risk Management Summit.

McAfee Tuesday said it's signed an agreement to acquire privately held Trust Digital as part of its strategy to expand into the mobile security arena, the enterprise sector in particular. The acquisition price for Trust Digital was not disclosed.

Symantec's stunning decision to put $1.28 billion in cash on the table to buy most of the security services within VeriSign is a gambit that is drawing mixed reactions in the analyst community, but Symantec insists the VeriSign certificate and authentication services are key elements in what's shaping up to be one of the biggest self-transformations ever in the security industry.

Giving network managers a way to provide access, single sign-on and provisioning controls in cloud-computing environments got a boost today from both Novell and a much smaller competitor, start-up Symplified.

FireEye Wednesday unveiled its first appliances built for in-line blocking of Web and e-mail malware using wholly non-signature-based detection methods.

One day after security vendor McAfee sent out a bad <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/042110-flawed-mcafee-update-paralyzes-corporate.html">antivirus update</a> that crippled corporate and consumer Windows-based computers, the suffering wrought by the update, DAT 5958, continues.

These "White Hat" security researchers are ethical hackers whose discoveries and inventions shake things up — as they try to stay one step ahead of their underground "Black Hat" cousins…

The Jericho Forum, which advocates improving e-commerce security through knowledge that network perimeters are fading, says organizations need to ask themselves and their vendors tougher questions.

Google's Chrome OS Netbook will feature a host of built-in security technologies designed to protect users from malware and other threats, a Google engineer said at the recent RSA Conference.

Microsoft announced at the RSA Conference Tuesday that it has begun shipping Forefront Identity Manager 2010, server software for provisioning and de-provisioning user access and privileges for network and database resources.

<a href="http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2010/021710-rsa-innovation.html">Cisco</a> on Monday outlined its security product-development strategy aimed at providing a new type of "always on" security protection for mobile devices as well as a way to establish controls over cloud-computing applications used by the enterprise. Cisco is calling the initiative its Secure Borderless Network architecture.

As cloud computing adoption climbs, hosting providers are inking deals with security vendors to provide security-as-a-service options to customers. But will enterprise IT managers buy into these often novel forms of security woven into a cloud computing environment?

Technologies come and go, but managing networks is still about problem-solving in a changing world, as these IT executives can attest.