Throughout the last decade, society has witnessed an explosion of network connectivity among PCs and mobile devices as well as a vast proliferation of networked applications, ranging from Web-based email to online banking. The end result of this is that network connectivity has become an almost indispensable resource for many individuals.

Being held for the first time on March 18, 2008 at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, AJAXWorld Security Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build secure AJAX applications and demonstrate what the best practices are to mitigate security problems in AJAX apps. It is led by one of the world's foremost AJAX security experts and popular teachers, Billy Hoffman.

Data corruption is an insidious problem in storage. While there are many forms of corruption, there are also many ways to prevent them. For example, enterprise class servers use error checking and correcting caches and memory to protect against single and double bit errors. System buses have similar protective measures such as parity. Communications going over the network are protected by checksums.

Trend Micro, a provider of network antivirus and Internet content security software and services, has announced a solution, the Trend Micro ServerProtect for Linux, that provides highly scalable and real-time protection for internal and external endpoints.

BitDefender has announced the public availability of its new Enterprise Security Suite for Mail and File Servers running on Samba or FreeBSD. The powerful, new Linux-based security suite - including BitDefender Mail Protection for Enterprises, BitDefender Mail Protection for SMB, and BitDefender for Samba File Servers - is now currently available for download in both enterprise and SMB editions.

Novell announced that Finland's Ministry of Defence has selected Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as its platform for critical process management and documentation applications, messaging services, and Intranet portal. The Ministry tapped Novell's Linux platform for its proven reliability, high availability and security.

The Linux community - nearly 29 million platform users - has been plagued for years by spam which, according to industry statistics, is dramatically on the rise. Despite relentless efforts to stop it (including billions of dollars spent to develop anti-spam solutions), spam continues to infiltrate our in-boxes every day. Not only does it cost consumers and businesses precious time, money, and resources, but it also represents a huge security risk since many spam sites infect individual computers and corporate networks with viruses or spyware.

It emerged this week that KDE developer Maksim Orlovich had discovered an incorrect bounds check in kjs, the JavaScript interpreter engine used by Konqueror and other parts of KDE, that allows a heap based buffer overflow when decoding specially crafted UTF-8 encoded URI sequences. According to KDE.org source code patches have already been made available which fix these vulnerabilities.

C/C++ language variadic functions are functions that accept a variable number of arguments. Variadic functions are implemented using either the ANSI C stdarg approach or, historically, the UNIX System V vararg approach. Both approaches require that the contract between the developer and user of the variadic function not be violated by the user.

Information security is a top priority for many companies. Protecting information from external threats such as hackers, viruses, and spam, as well as governmental regulation requirements (SOX, HIPAA, NISPOM, etc.), are driving IT purchases beyond ROI as C-level executives seek to assure shareholders (and themselves) that assets are secure within the company complex. Viewed as today's growth market, many software/hardware/service companies are creating offerings to mitigate perceived risk or actual liability.

The brouhaha over a presentation given last week by Michael Lynn has taken on a life of its own on the worldwide web. No surprise here. Lynn's presentation can be found easily, as can many other interesting related items. SYS-CON Media herewith presents a few things we've found.

The purpose of this article is to show how basic security principles can help you develop programs that are harder for the bad guys to break. We'll examine a simple function that executes a command as though it were typed at the keyboard, exactly what the library function system does. But unlike many system implementations, we'll constrain what happens so the calling program can't trick it into executing some other program.

IBM has announced the results from its 2004 Global Business Security Index Report and provided an early look at potential security threats in 2005.

No computer system is safe from security threats. There, I said it. With that out of the way, I'd like to share my concern over a potentially disturbing fact: Linux is gaining popularity on the desktop (and everywhere else for that matter), which is resulting in a loss of market share for the dominant desktop, Microsoft Windows.

Security giant Symantec, The New York Times is reporting this morning, is 'close to acquiring' Veritas for more than $13 billion, trumping yesterday's $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle, and dwarfing Honeywell's $1.5 billion bid this week for Novar. Only the possible $35 billion merger between Sprint and Nextel would be a bigger deal than Symantec-Veritas.

In an era where everybody is connected to a potentially harmful Internet with an increasing number of complex and distributed applications, controlling what the computers do has become significantly harder. At the core, simple actions (executing software, e-commerce, etc.) rely on trust relationships; what if your computer (or the merchant's) has been compromised and alters your perception of reality?

Speedy disk backups are gaining in popularity as networking demands increase, but the traditional tape data protection won't disappear overnight. Maybe it's time to think about the best of both worlds.

Users of the popular Mplayer media device are being urged to upgrade to the latest version, due to a bug.

It's no secret to technical developers that security issues need to be taken into consideration when developing policies. However, the extent of those security issues can easily be overlooked by many organizations.

Does the open source community provide world-class security technology? Can organizations stop dealing with commercial vendors for security software? To avoid any undue suspense, the answers are: 'Emphatically yes' and 'Maybe, but you probably need to make an investment of some kind.'

Linux folks tend to have a better eye on security. I realize that's an overwhelmingly general and wide-sweeping statement, but that's my opinion. I've been working with Linux for a very long time, and most of the other users in the community tend to be highly technical and thus aware of many of the security concerns facing the networked world today.

Seemingly everyone has insight into the open source versus closed source security debate. Each side provides plausible arguments for the benefits of their own model and points out drawbacks of the other. The proponents of open source argue that the source code is open and available for anyone to see, for many sets of eyes to examine, and is therefore more secure.

As the state of the art in operating systems (OS) continues to advance, an unnerving trend has emerged: vulnerabilities in tightly integrated operating systems. How do you address this? With an effective combination of educated staff, proper procedures, and technology.

As a decision maker in your IT organization, you're aware that your Linux systems share is growing (if your enterprise follows today's business trend). Linux installations are now available on every major hardware platform. New projects in development include Linux systems in an increasing share, and you're challenged with incorporating these Linux systems seamlessly into your operations and business processing.

Symantec's CTO talks about comprehensive security and how today's IT organizations must address it.

This article presents a Linux kernel module capable of verifying digital signatures of ELF binaries before running them. This kernel module is available under the GPL license and has been successfully tested for kernel 2.5.66 and above

Enterprises worried about cybersecurity should pay more attention to their own employees than to the as-of-yet unrealized threat of cyberterrorism, two cybersecurity experts warned a group of IT professionals. (800 words)

As with its last software update, the Apache Software Foundation said that 2.0.46 was the 'best version of Apache available' and recommended that users of prior Apache versions upgrade.

Our Hero uncovers Microsoft's ingenious, covert marketing efforts to promote Linux and open source via its own products' security vulnerabilities. This column is intended for mature audiences with a keen eye for sarcasm. (1,600 words)

At first glance, using open-source software for a firewall or other security application seems counterintuitive, even absurd. Why would a corporation use code that's available to anyone - hackers, cyber-terrorists, disgruntled employees - to protect their most vital information assets? Yet that's what's happening at places like Stanford University, EDS, and Los Alamos National Labs, to name but a few of the many organizations using open-source security software.

Robert McMillan talks to Marc Sachs of the White House Cyberspace Security Office about the current and future role of open-source technologies in U.S. government departments. (2,200 words)

The list is misleading in that many readers and editors would have seen this as an FBI certification of the relative equality of security problems between systems running Microsoft Windows and those running Unix.

PureSecure is much more polished, more complete, and more fully featured than its free software counterpart ACID. It's not free for commercial use, however. (1,200 words)

All it takes is time and free software to set up a powerful intrusion detection system for your Unix system. Follow along as Joe Barr installs ACID on his system and discovers a big security hole. (1,450 words)

All vendors have made mistakes at some time, and no vendor seems to be any better or worse than the other. Fortunately, these mistakes do not appear to be malicious -- just the result of a game of Chinese Whispers. (1,200 words)

If you want to do two-way synchronization with rsync, you'll need to run it twice. unison does two-way synchronization by default and well, thank you. How to make unison work for you.

Our hero ponders Windows XP's fast user switching, which leads him to Microsoft's approach to adding features to its operating systems, which leads him to the beautiful simplicity of the Unix philosophy of each tool doing one thing well, which leads him to rsync. Read on, it all makes sense! (2,000 words)

From denial, to diagnosis, to rebuilding and hardening the system, Joe walks us through the life cycle of a hack. (1,700 words)

This week Joe Barr presents the first of two columns about stealth scans, and NMAP, a port scanner used by attackers and system administrators alike. (1,400 words)

Bob Toxen, the author of Real World Linux Security: Intrusion Prevention, Detection, and Recovery, boasts an impressive résumé as a writer, developer, creator, and software architect. Cameron Laird conducted a lively discussion with Toxen on security, Linux hacking, open source development, and more.