IT Management
eWeek, 10/25/04: Sesame Networks Tackles Wi-Fi Guest Security
By Carol Ellison
Canadian Wi-Fi network company Sesame Networks makes its U.S. debut Monday with a security product designed to enable secure guest access to the Internet over enterprise wireless connections.
Guest access has been a sticking point for Wi-Fi networks in enterprises where managers fear the consequences of opening segments of their WLANs (wireless LANs) for general public use. If they make Wi-Fi guest access available at all, they typically do it by running an open segment in front of a firewall on the corporate WLAN.
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IT Automation
eWeek, 10/25/04: IBM Pushes IT Automation
By Paula Musich
Three years after launching its autonomic computing effort, IBM says customers are reaping the benefits of IT automation, but the real promise of the initiative remains elusive for most.
IBM officials at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo here last week rolled out new security advancements and relayed a handful of customer success stories as they summarized the company's challenge to develop adaptable, self-managing systems.
Beyond early experiments with customers such as the United States Tennis Association, IBM touted an annual $1 million in savings that Whirlpool Corp. achieved by leveraging automation functions within Tivoli Identity Manager.
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Security
The New York Times, 10/25/04: New I.B.M. Report Will Warn of Computer Security Threats
By JOHN MARKOFF
I.B.M. plans to begin releasing on Monday a monthly report of threats to computer networks in an effort to establish an indicator similar to the federal government's Homeland Security Advisory System.
The report, to be named the Global Business Security Index, is intended to give computing managers early warning of a range of computer vulnerabilities like attacks by malicious hackers, automated softwares, viruses and worms, as well as to gauge the impact of political upheavals and natural disasters.
The index will be generated from data gathered by 2,700 International Business Machines information security employees and a global network of about a half-million sensors - software programs and security hardware distributed to its customers and its own networks in 34 countries. The network of sensors routinely detects 100 million suspected or actual attacks against I.B.M. customers each month.
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The New York Times, 10/25/04: Identity Theft Is Epidemic. Can It Be Stopped?
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
PAUSING in the foyer of a comfortable suburban home two days before Halloween in 2002, Kevin Barrows, a special agent with the F.B.I., could not bring himself to open the front door. He and a team of agents had just spent several hours searching every room in the house, in New Rochelle , N.Y., but they were leaving empty-handed. Months of investigating had led Mr. Barrows to believe that someone was orchestrating a huge fraud from the house, yet he had not found a single scrap of evidence.
Still, something bothered him about the furniture in one of the bedrooms. It seemed oddly oversized. So he headed back upstairs for a second look, and his attention focused on an expansive canopy over the bed. When he pushed at the draping, he found that it was weighed down with files. They contained reams of confidential financial information about hundreds of individuals whose identities had been pilfered in an intricate scheme that illicitly netted more than $50 million.
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Hardware
eWeek, 10/25/04: Quiet Computing
By Jeffrey Burt
Computer makers have begun phasing out the current decade-old desktop PC chassis in favor of a newer design aimed at giving PCs the thermal headroom they need to handle new, hotter-running processors and graphics cards.
The result for end users will be smaller form factors that run more quietly and reliably, while enabling them to have the latest technology at costs not much higher than those for traditional models.
Most of the new systems will be based on the BTX chassis design, championed by Intel Corp. and various component makers to replace the current ATX model.
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Big Picture
Infoworld, 10/25/04: Vint Cerf: Concerns over packets and politics
Father of the Internet says it is better today than at height of bubble
By John Blau
For a technologist, Vint Cerf is plenty opinionated.
In a telephone interview, Cerf -- often called "the father of the Internet" for his co-authoring of the formidable Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) -- fielded questions on an array of topics, including his disdain for the current U.S. administration's handling of science and technology issues. He's one of a few IT executives of this caliber willing to attach their names publicly to a political cause.
In his current function as senior vice president of technology strategy at MCI (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc., Cerf still has his finger on the pulse of the Net. He's concerned about the rise of cyber attacks and encourages everyone to scream at developers of buggy software. He's confident that IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) will come soon if for no other reason than China alone could someday devour more than a third of the Net addresses currently available with IPv4. And he prefers to avoid contributing to what he calls "the current hype" over VOIP (voice over IP) because, in his opinion, this new service is just one of many available via the Internet, whereas telephony is the main service in circuit-switched public networks.
IDGNS: If you look at all the cyber attacks these days, what scares you most?
Cerf: The harder attacks are not the subtle "I'm going to break into your operating system attack" but rather the DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks where somebody has already broken into 100,000 PCs sitting on totally unprotected DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and cable modems and has all of them launch back at the target. This is really hard to defend against. We're now deploying systems that will detect these kinds of attacks and try to divert them before they get into our customers' access lines. Because when these DDOS attacks swamp access lines, then filtering at the other end doesn't help.
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