The Business Centre

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.

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."

Here's a travel advisory: The next time you find yourself in a foreign city at night with nothing to do, take my advice: rent a movie in your hotel room. Don't go to discos. And if you do go out, don't bring a smart phone with you.

Every year, more than 5,000 laptops are lost in taxis in London, New York, Chicago and other large cities. According to our research, in 2008 companies' topmost security investment was laptop encryption. Laptop hard drives are getting bigger and now can hold hundreds of thousand to hundreds of millions of sensitive records.

VPNs are well established as essential tools for corporate communications, but they are not all created equal. Here are six questions and their answers that can help you make decisions about which VPN technology to use.

Along with the potential performance and coverage benefits of 802.11n come a few new security risks, says industry security guru Joshua Wright. Wright presented a Webinar last week that outlined several new vulnerabilities that high-speed 802.11n networks introduce.

Version 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools.

All evidence points to the fact that smartphone viruses will be a threat to your network even though they aren't at this moment. After all, the latest mobile devices are packed with more and more applications and corporate data, are enabled for real Web browsing and online collaboration, and can access corporate servers. What's more, they live outside your firewall and often make use of three wireless networks (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular).

In the immortal words of the Young Ones "[A] social conscience is like a garden shed. If you try to eat it, it will stick in your throat!". At least that is the lesson that the EU seems to be learning [1] in its efforts to promote greater competition in the technology industry as it tries to implement the use of alternate (to Microsoft) office software and operating systems that adhere to open standards.

Last week I publicly released a white paper called Fixing the Internet: A Security Solution in this blog.

Long-time readers know that I often rant about how insecure the Internet is, and how few solutions will do anything to change that equation during the next 5 to 10 years. I've also recommended a handful of solutions over the years, and accepted the resulting criticism that goes along with proposing big ideas.