This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

Are enterprise applications really secure? It depends on whom you ask.

Smartphones, tablets, social networks, and cloud services are all popular, incredibly useful -- and a security risk. These days, the security focus is on mobile devices, as they tend to be used a lot to work with corporate information, but the variety of platforms, the fact many are employee-owned, and uneven security capabilities all add up to a real -- sometimes impossible -- challenge to manage them in the same way as the corporate PC.

Employees bringing in their own devices and choosing their own application services is significantly increasing the risk to enterprise data.

Oracle may be subtly misleading customers about the severity of some of the vulnerabilities found in its database software, according to researchers from database security software provider Application Security (AppSec).

In the last three months of 2010 attackers managed to serve 3 million malicious advertising, or malvertising, impressions every day. That's the headline figure from a report released today from Web security firm Dasient. According to Dasient, that's a 100 percent increase from the preceding quarter.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has launched a revision of the Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM). The new matrix (version 1.1), available for free download, is designed to provide fundamental security principles to guide cloud vendors and help prospective cloud customers assess the overall security risk of a cloud provider.

Hackers love a challenge. And more than that, they love cash.