In a pretty eventful halfweek, which saw the passage of the IPRED law in Sweden, a resulting drop in internet traffic to an increased demand for anonymizers, the Police have began raiding suspected fil sharers. This raid was reportedly a part of an international sting operation that involved raids in Britian, Belgium, Netherlands and Spain.
Following the passage of the IPRED law in Sweden a few days ago, there’s been an increased demand for anonymizing services. The Pirate Bay has for instance started its own anonymizing service called IPREDator (you get the drift). Other anonymizers are also offering IPRED protection.
On April 1 Sweden passed the EU directive called IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) into law. That same day, internet traffic dropped by 30% according The Local, an online newspaper. The law will allow courts to order ISPs to hand over information that identify suspected illegal file sharers. The belief is that commercial infractions of intellectual property law within the EU will eventually be criminalised.
Remember the post about how big security vendors are moving down the food chain to consolidate their hold on the security market? Well IBM through its partnership with (a much smaller) BigFix has released a desktop security solution that is positioned to enhance endpoint security and “reduce cost”.
I’m not sure what the real intentions are but doesn’t it sound a bit odd that the Telegraph media group CIO will thank the guys at Hackersblog for exposing their SQL injection vulnerabilities?
What would you do if your security vendor went bankrupt? It is said that the security industry is recession proof but the reality is that companies are cutting costs and that means less spending on security solutions too.
In response to this changing market dynamic the big boys (IBM, Cisco, EMC etc) are repositioning their products to be attractive to smaller budgets.
In 1982 Johnson & Johnson the company making Tylenol had to contend with a major financial and image problem when contaminated Tylenol capsules caused the deaths of 7 people. Investigators discovered that someone had filled Tylenol capsules with solid cyanide compound and replaced the original Tylenol bottles with poisoned ones in some supermarkets and drug stores.
What did the company do and what lessons do we learn from it?
I read about a startup (Altor Networks) that has developed a virtual firewall for VMware hypevisor. It is basically a virtual appliance that you plug into your virtual environment to act as a firewall between your virtual switches and virtual machines. It also wraps firewall policies for each VM so that even when migrated, the VMs will still be protected.
A woman from Gothenburg, Sweden logs into her internet bank to pay some bills only to find more than $1 BILLION (yes you read right) in her account - a local news website reports.
For those who don’t already know, the March 2009 edition of Insecure magazine has been released.
I found these articles interesting:
Building a bootable BackTrack 4 thumb drive with persistent changes and Nessus
A framework for quantitative privacy measurement
Why fail? Secure your virtual assets
As you might have guessed, these are the only articles I have read.
