Security: Features

If you want to know about the latest malicious rootkit, ask security researcher Dino Dai Zovi. He'll tell you all about his proof of concept rootkit called Vitriol that uses virtual machine instructions in Intel processors to hide a rootkit at the virtualization layer.

Type of rootkit: User mode

Spam. It fills our in-boxes, wastes our time and spreads malware -- and it's only getting worse. According to Ferris Research, which studies messaging and content control, 40 trillion spam messages are expected to be sent in 2008, costing businesses more than $140 billion worldwide -- a significant increase from the 18 trillion spam messages sent in 2006 and the 30 trillion in 2007.

The Jericho Forum, a group created in 2004 by IT security managers convinced that firewalls and other perimeter gateways had become a hindrance to e-commerce, made quite a splash with its rallying cry of "de-perimeterization."

Security software customers are speaking with their feet: They want security updates and other security interruptions out of their faces, and they won't hesitate to dump their security suites because of performance drag -- whether or not it's actually the security software that's to blame.

Consumers who sign up for identity-theft monitoring services may be getting a lot less protection against some common types of fraud than they assume they are, according to an online guide released Monday by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC).

Relax, we're still all about the channel. That's the message Symantec is seeking to send to its partners after remarks by its COO during a conference call had many questioning the security vendor's commitment to the indirect model.

Are we at war? Yes, and not just in the miserable and bloody campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. Government agencies at all levels - local, state and federal - have been subject to malicious attacks and victims of a flourishing underground criminal industry that some observers say is bigger than the $US321 billion global drug trade.

Cloud computing is fraught with security risks, according to analyst firm Gartner. Smart customers will ask tough questions, and consider getting a security assessment from a neutral third party before committing to a cloud vendor, Gartner says in a June report titled "Assessing the Security Risks of Cloud Computing".

Unpredictability is a fact of life. Whether terrorist attacks, cataclysmic weather or simply a backhoe severing a power cable, enterprises never know when their operations may be threatened.

When Cisco Systems announced in June 2004 that it planned to develop network access control technology, it drew enormous attention to what had been an obscure market niche.