On October 22, 2002, an attack on the thirteen servers that act as the backbone of the Internet was carried out, briefly disabling nine of them. This drew attention to the often criticized organization that operates these servers, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Coincidentally, an October 2, 2002 report from ICANN addresses the issue of internet security. The...

Periodically a series of "important messages" about new email viruses make their way through various mailing lists. While savvy Internet users can usually immediately spot these hoaxes, they can be both intimidating and frightening to neophytes (not to mention the bandwidth wasted when the messages are passed on to other users.) One of the better sites that track both email and other computer...

The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) is one of the most high-profile operations for the development and adoption of an industry standard for personal computer security. The main participants in the TCPA are Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. This Web site has many documents written for or about the alliance. The most significant resource is the latest version of the main...

Based in the UK, IWS is "an online resource that aims to stimulate debate about a range of subjects from information security to information operations and e-commerce," with an emphasis on offensive and defensive information operations. To these ends, it offers a number of resources, including selected documents, articles, and online journals that relate to twelve topics, such as computer...

During the final weeks of July, a computer worm known as Code Red spread to over 350,000 computers on six continents. The two sites listed above provide details and analysis of the worm incident. This site, from University of California's Cooperative Association for Internet Data analysis (CIDA), provides a wealth of data on the origin and spread of Code Red. A neat feature is the animation of the...

The Demos think tank in the United Kingdom consistently finds new perspectives and outlooks on important topics, and this latest collection of essays published in May 2008 is no exception. Specifically, these fourteen essays "explore the underlying challenges and realities of privacy in an open society, and argue for a new settlement between the individual and society; the public and the states;...

What is Unseen, you ask? This free service "provides privacy and security for messaging, email and calling." The free version allows visitors to perform group audio calls, share files, and create encrypted emails. First-time users should check out the FAQ section for additional details on how Unseen functions and the reason for its recent move to Iceland. This version is compatible with all...

The Safe Internet Programming group at the Princeton University Department of Computer Science in 1996 published a paper on the practice known as "web spoofing," through which an attacker intervenes between an end-user browsing the Web and real Web sites. The attacker sets up a shadow copy of the Web, and as users request pages from sites they will receive pages from the attacker's site instead....

This handy little application is designed to protect users' DSL or cable-connected PC from hackers. This edition of Zone Alarm includes four security services: a firewall, an application control, an Internet lock, and zones. All told, these four services allow users to control which traffic enters their computer and afford individuals the ability to monitor all activity on their computer as well....