Stories by: Ellen Messmer

The unfolding cliffhanger in San Francisco this week -- in which a city network administrator has been arrested for allegedly holding the network hostage -- represents an extreme example of the insider threat that IT security vendors and others have been sounding the alarm about for years.

There's nothing like a global credit crunch to get the corporate mind to focus on what really matters when it comes to spending on information technology. For financial-services firms caught in the middle of the subprime-mortgage fiscal storm, there's also pressure to make every dollar count.

Technology we take for granted today was new not so long ago, and somebody had to name it. Though sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly who deserves credit -- or blame -- here's a shot a some of the more familiar ones.

With a goal of getting IT professionals to use standard terminology and eliminate ambiguity in expressing important risk-management concepts, the Open Group is finalizing a 50-page compendium of "risk-management and analysis taxonomy."

The Gpcode.ak virus, which encrypts files on the victim's desktop and demands a ransom to decrypt them, uses encryption that so far has proven too strong to crack. But Kaspersky Lab, which first identified Gpcode.ak earlier this month, says there is a way for most victims to at least recover their files.

Symantec Wednesday said a new version of its compliance-process automation software to ship next fall will add a way to identify data assets by accepting feeds through third-party asset-management systems.

Security issues often seem to smolder more than burn, but these six are certainly capable of lighting a fire under IT professionals at a moment's notice. Handle with care.

Hong Kong and China are the "most dangerous" places to surf the Web based on country domain, according to McAfee's annual assessment of the riskiest and safest places in cyberspace.

Though data-loss prevention gear is proving a boon for corporate security, its "see all, know all" style of content monitoring can cast a harsh glare on business practices and legal issues that end up putting information-technology staff on the spot.

Five former Cisco engineers have co-founded a start-up called Rohati Systems whose products take dead aim at traditional perimeter firewalls.

McAfee and Yahoo this week announced a partnership on Web security in which Yahoo's search engine is making freely available to users the warnings about unwanted or malicious code on Web sites as determined through McAfee's security technology.