Started in a dorm room four years ago, the social networking site Facebook now claims to be the fourth most-trafficked site in the world. Ninety million active users pound on 10,000 servers every day, uploading millions and millions of pieces of information in a given month. For example, "friends," who socialize in 21 languages, add 500 million photos per month.

John Stewart doesn't talk like your typical corporate executive. He said that his company, Cisco Systems, has been lucky when it comes to security and that his company's Self-Defending Network marketing push has painted "a big bull's-eye" on its products.

The Convention on Cybercrime is the work of the Council of Europe and is aimed at facilitating international cooperation in the investigation and prosecution of computer crimes. Since the Convention came into being in 2001, the COE has been working to address the growing international concern over the threats posed by hacking and other computer-related crimes.

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.

At IBM Internet Security System's, the company's primary security research organization is called X-Force. Kris Lamb, director of X-Force, says his group is charged with knowing where potential threats will arise and deliver product, services and education to customers about how to stay ahead of the risk. Recently Lamb discussed with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie what he sees as the most critical challenges and opportunities facing enterprise IT security managers today.

Security has been a bit of a black art at Google. Unlike rival Microsoft, which publishes detailed information on its monthly patches and has openly evangelized the steps it takes to secure software, Google has generally been quiet when it comes to talking about security and it has kept the team that keeps Google's Web sites secure under wraps. Douglas Merrill, Google's vice president of engineering and chief information officer explains what Google gets from its security investments, and why his company believes that locking down the enterprise PC is not the way to go.

In January, Cisco announced plans to acquire IronPort Systems, maker of communications security appliances, citing synergies between Cisco's threat mitigation, communications, policy control, and management products and IronPort's messaging and Web protection products. This acquisition won't be like most of the ones Cisco makes, says Scott Weiss, the founder and CEO of IronPort, because IronPort won't be integrated into the networking giant but operated instead as a separate unit.

In an exclusive interview with Computerworld editor in chief Don Tennant at CA World in Las Vegas on Tuesday, CA president and CEO John Swainson spoke candidly about a range of issues confronting his company, including the prospects for taking civil action against CA co-founder Charles Wang. Excerpts from the interview follow:

Russian security professionals Eugene and Natalya Kaspersky discussed the Russian mafia, the latest in hacker tricks and their view that the bad guys are winning.

On Monday at 6 a.m., Dave DeWalt stood in front of McAfee's Plano, Texas, offices to greet employees with coffee, doughnuts and a handshake. "They were wondering, 'Who's the guy in the suit?'" says the former EMC vice president who became McAfee's CEO on April 2.

Olaf Kolkman, a Dutch DNS expert, is the new chair of the Internet Architecture Board, a panel of 13 leading network engineers who provide technical oversight to the IETF, the Internet's premier standards-setting body. He's also CEO of NLnet Labs, an Amsterdam research group focused on DNS security.