SecurityEssentials

If you've had any money in the stock market, it's been a bloodbath the last few weeks. It's hard to remember that any 10-year period in stock market history has always ended up with better returns than any other investment. As financial analysts argue over whether we are already in or just headed into a deep global recession, we are facing a rough, contracting period. People with good jobs are holding on to them tighter than ever.

Return on investment, or ROI, is a big deal in business. Any business venture needs to demonstrate a positive return on investment, and a good one at that, in order to be viable.

NetWitness, a vendor of networking threat-analysis software, is offering a free version of its NetWitness Investigator package by download, the company said Monday.

Computer systems that run the world's critical infrastructure are not as secure as they should be and insiders are mad.

Criminals can make as much as US$5 million a year by planting nearly-worthless security software on PCs, then badgering users with so many bogus malware warnings that they fork over their credit card, a noted crimeware researcher said Friday.

Proscriptive adoption of information security standards like ISO27001 is bound to fail, according to Joel Weise, principal engineer and chief technologist, Sun client services security program office, Sun Microsystems.

Up to 79 percent of the 156 Australian IT managers and C-level executives responding to a recent survey have suffered IT data breaches.

Think your security staffers are trustworthy? Competent? Knowledgeable? Listen to a security professional's horror stories, and you might think again.

The Internet attack took Yahoo engineers by surprise. It came so fast and with such intensity that Yahoo, then the Web's second most-popular destination, was knocked offline for about three hours.

It was a mistake so bad the person who made it asked that his name and company not be mentioned here. Let's call him Frank.

The hackers who launched cyberattacks against the former Soviet republic of Georgia two months ago probably had links to the Russian government, even though no hard evidence has been uncovered of official involvement, a report by an all-volunteer group of experts said Friday.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people.

When it comes to investing in computer security, the U.S. federal government could get a good return on investment by shoring up its networking protocols, according to the man who's been hired to coordinate computer security between federal agencies.

There's a new service for conference speakers at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this year: lawyers on call.

The chain of command of a cybercrime gang is not unlike the Mafia, an evolution that shows how online crime is becoming a broad, well-organized endeavor.

Australian organizations are now more vigilant when it comes to safeguarding sensitive information. It is a necessary measure when you consider that cybercriminals are constantly devising new ways to breach business security systems, from creating new spam techniques to using popular Web 2.0 Web sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube as a front for malicious Web sites that lure users to download malware. Add to that, social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, have an enormous impact on workplace security as use of these sites becomes more popular among employees.

The Web sites of three of the security industry's best-known companies include security flaws that could be used to launch scams against customers, according to a new report.

Bruce Schneier is one of the foremost experts on cryptography and is a well-known security author and commentator. He is the founder of the managed security services company Counterpane, which was acquired in October 2006 by BT. Schneier sat down with IDG News Service at the Infosec security show in London to talk about the effectiveness of security products and the psychology of security.

It used to be easy for US Bank to determine which users and systems could be trusted, and which should be viewed with suspicion. Then along came Web 2.0.

A group of security researchers Wednesday said they have infiltrated one of the world's biggest botnets and can snatch control of compromised machines from the hackers.