Recent Articles
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IBM’s Ascential Deal Expected to Bolster WebSphere
IBM is boosting its already-hefty suite of WebSphere integration products with its $1.1 billion acquisition of data integration developer Ascential Software Corp. Ascential, of Westboro, Mass., will bring functionality in several key areas, including data transformation, data cleansing and data profiling, along with classic ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) tools—all capabilities that are useful as…
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Geekfathers: CyberCrime Mobs Revealed
Crime is now organized on the Internet. Operating in the anonymity of cyberspace, Web mobs with names like Shadowcrew and stealthdivision are building networks that help crackers and phishers, money launderers and fences skim off some of the billions that travel through the Web every day. The players and their games change so quickly it’s…
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Ready or Not, Here SP2 Comes
Yes, Windows XP Service Pack 2 is a major step forward in Windows XP functionality and security. Yes, anyone who programmed their applications by the book shouldn’t have too much trouble with SP2. Yes, almost all SP2-unfriendly applications now have updates that make them work and play well with SP2. And yes, you’re going to…
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The Trouble with Troubleshooting
Last week I ran into some interesting technical challenges. One was of my own (un)doing, while the other seemed to be partially the result of a bug. One tool we like to use around here is some form of partition backup tool. It used to be that plain old Ghost or DriveImage would work just…
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Tips for Testing An Intrusion Prevention System
Testing an intrusion prevention system is still as much an art as a science, although the science is slowly gaining ground. eWEEK Labs’ testbed for Top Layer Networks Inc.’s Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 combined an artificial, lab-created Internet connection with traffic carried by our ISP. To get repeatable, comparable results, we also ran attack tools…
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IPSes are Coming of Age
Four years ago, the intrusion prevention system market consisted of a few next-generation intrusion detection system appliances with elementary blocking capabilities. Most vendors and analysts at the time said IPSes would remain a minor offshoot of the IDS segment, mainly because administrators were loath to run appliances that could block network traffic actively. Those predictions,…
