Paul Roberts

U.K. antivirus company Sophos PLC said Wednesday that it bought Canadian company ActiveState Corp. for US$23 million in cash, adding ActiveState's line of antispam products to Sophos' enterprise antivirus software.

The OASIS Internet standards consortium said Monday that its members ratified Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Version 1.1 as an official standard, approving changes to the specification will improve interoperability with other Web services security standards.

Privacy advocates are warning that recent changes to the .com and .net database of domain names by VeriSign Inc. could violate the privacy of millions of Internet users, inadvertently sending confidential e-mail content and Web surfing data to VeriSign's systems.

Antivirus companies are warning Internet users about W32.Swen, a new worm that spreads using e-mail messages, vulnerable network connections, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and peer-to-peer (P-to-P) networks.

U.S. Federal law enforcement officials were joined by Microsoft Corp.'s general counsel in trumpeting the Aug. 29 arrest of a Minnesota teenager believed to be responsible for releasing one version of the W32.Blaster worm last month.

Organizations that use Microsoft Corp.

The CERT Coordination Center is warning users about a serious security vulnerability in the OpenSSH (Secure Shell) that could enable a remote attacker to run malicious code or launch a denial of service attack against machines running the popular suite of secure network connectivity tools.

A security company said Tuesday that it found an example of working computer source code that exploits the latest critical security hole disclosed by Microsoft Corp.