PC World Business

Does my company need to be more proactive about insiders during hard times?

Here's a statistical downer: there will be around 40 trillion inbox-clogging spam e-mail messages delivered this year. Experts know this because there were 30 trillion spam messages last year. With this much hay in the stack, it's hard to find those message needles, and that's why some smart companies are looking beyond public e-mail.

There has been a long history of attacks on the Domain Name System ranging from brute-force denial-of-service attacks to targeted attacks requiring specialized software. In July 2008 a new DNS cache-poisoning attack was unveiled that is considered especially dangerous because it does not require substantial bandwidth or processor resources nor does it require sophisticated techniques.

Heard about a competitor's security being breached? Then you're probably next. In fact, you may already be owned.

What if I was to tell you that I have a secret that could end the Internet as you know it? What if I was only going to tell you at a fee-based conference once speculation had gone on for a month or more? How would you respond to that?

In terms of malicious insiders committing fraud, can anything "really" be done?

If you needed any more reminders about why it isn't a good idea to use external mail services to conduct critical business, the recent break-in to US Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com Yahoo inbox should be it. Of note is that following the disclosure of the inboxes the compromised address and another address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, have been suspended.

Microsoft's Security Vulnerability Research & Defense team (SVRD) have recently posted information online about the Cross Site Scripting (XSS) filter to be incorporated into Internet Explorer 8 when it is released.

No one will deny the global celebrity of Angelina Jolie. She's on the cover of magazines, stars in blockbuster movies and is a ratings bonanza each time she appears on TV. Now that she's had twins, she's got triple the appeal for some fans.

Bill Cheswick -- best known for writing "Firewalls and Internet Security" in 1994 and his earlier work at Bell Labs -- doesn't want to let commercial blogging software within hacking distance of his hardened Web server. A self-described Apple fanboy, Cheswick does want to host his own blogs, however, one about his job as lead member of the technical staff at AT&T Research and another about personal stuff, "if I can tell the difference."

By and large we have all gotten used to spam and unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). Even if you buy or build the best filters, if you are at all active online you're going to get at least a few spam messages every day. It has become one of those things that you can't avoid, like death and taxes only more irritating.