Stories about: First Security

It is the surely the first security demonstration in history to draw inspiration from a notorious 1970s porn flick and a more recent Brad Pitt film, based on the underground bare-knuckle fighting scene.

The market can expect to see by 2008 the fruits of a recently-formed initiative to develop the first globally available Linux-based mobile device platform based on industry-developed standards.

Russ Housley is the first chair of the IETF with a particular expertise in network security. Housley, who runs consulting firm Vigil Security, has been active in the IETF for nearly 20 years and helped write early e-mail security and public key infrastructure standards. Three months into his job as chair of the leading Internet standards body, Housley talked with Carolyn Duffy Marsan about his strategy for bolting better security onto the freewheeling Internet.

Late at night, a system administrator performed a routine check of a crashed server, one of 48 systems comprising a major online infrastructure that generated about US$4 million per month in revenue. He was a bit surprised that the system had gone down, as it had been humming for months without any indication of being prone to crashing. The check uncovered three encrypted files. The administrator called on MANDIANT to analyse them.

The first Firefox 1.5 security vulnerability, made public Thursday, is not as critical as initially perceived, but a patch will be available to fix it early next year, a Mozilla executive said Thursday.

When version 1.0 of Firefox was released in November 2004, it caused a sensation as a seemingly more secure and more feature-rich option to Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer (IE) which for years had held a market share north of 90 percent and which Microsoft had barely bothered to improve.