Stories about: The SANS Institute

The SANS Institute has formalised its association with Shearwater Solutions by appointing the company as its local ANZ representative, as well as bringing it on board to organize a SANS security training event in Canberra in June.

The call to Bob Bailey, an IT executive with a major US government contractor, came on an otherwise ordinary day in October 2003. "Why are you attacking us?" demanded the caller, an IT leader with a Silicon Valley manufacturer. He wanted to know why Bailey's company had launched a denial-of-service attack against his network

A House subcommittee is scheduled to hear testimony from government and industry representatives about the extent to which US federal networks and critical infrastructure have been compromised by foreign hackers.

Four examinations -- each covering a specific programming language -- will be offered initially, Paller said. The four areas covered are C/C++, Java/J2EE, Perl/PHP and .Net/ASP. The first examinations will be offered in Washington in August and then will be rolled out worldwide through the rest of the year. The exams will cost US$400 to take.

A large group of organizations led by the SANS Institute has launched a new information security skills assessment and certification program for software programmers.

Computing on the Net is heading for a fall because security is a joke. So we summoned the best minds to see if we could put Humpty back together again.

The changing of the cybersecurity guard at the US Department of Homeland Security, coupled with complacency on the part of some corporate executives, has put a higher premium on information-sharing and cooperation between the private sector and the government.

Last year, David Saul, executive vice president and CIO of commercial insurer Zurich North America, pulled a dozen IT staffers away from their daily tasks to combat a virus that was attacking the company's firewalls. They did a good job limiting the damage, but it took two days - two days in which other work did not get done. Next time, Saul hopes to be ready to respond before a threat surfaces. "We want to be in a safety zone that doesn't require that kind of immediate mobilisation," he says.

When the Y2K bug threatened to disrupt business, CIOs had to convince management to pay attention to the issue. But with cyber-attacks, CIOs do not have a hard-and-fast deadline - an attack could come any day, and the consequences could be more lethal to a company's operations than Y2K ever was. That's why many CIOs are lobbying Mahogany Row for cyber-incident response team (CIRT) funding