Ellen Messmer

Getting the best deal on software licensing and hardware purchases isn't easy in an industry where there...

A vulnerability has been discovered in Symantec Corp. firewall products that would let a knowledgeable attacker hijack any connection to Symantec's software-based or appliance-based firewalls, thereby potentially gaining unauthorized access to internal corporate resources.

Getting the best deal on software licensing and hardware purchases isn't easy in an industry where there are almost no "real" published prices, and vendors are trying to squeeze every dime out of buyers that they can.

Symantec Corp. said it has entered into deals to acquire three security firms - Recourse Technologies Inc., Riptech Inc. and SecurityFocus Inc. - for a total of US$355 million in cash. Symantec also announced record quarterly revenues of $316 million, up 39 percent from the same quarter last year.

In his keynote address at an information technology auditing conference in New York, Howard Schmidt, U.S. President Bush's advisor on cybersecurity, predicted that networks operated in the U.S. and abroad are likely to be brought down by catastrophic events unless security greatly improves.

Although these are hard times for many in the IT industry, the status of information security professionals is on the rise - at least based on how much they're getting paid.

Telus Corp., the second largest telecomunications carrier in Canada, said it is deploying Arbor Networks Inc.'s denial-of-service product Peakflow DoS to protect its Internet backbone from attacks on Telus and its customers.

Network Associates and Internet Security Systems have forged an alliance to use each other