Nab Bad Guys Trying to Download ...

Computerworld - ... software so you can keep your job and stay out of jail. Well, you might end up in the slammer for other reasons, but if you use the new service from Open Harbor Inc., it won't be because you let Osama bin Laden get hold of your bits and bytes. The San Carlos, Calif.-based online service for global traders is unveiling a service this week to protect companies whose software can be downloaded over the Internet. According to Beth Peterson, the company's vice president of products, the service uses restricted-party screening (RPS) lists from the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries to check e-mail addresses, domains, IP addresses and other information to identify sources forbidden to receive goods from suppliers. Open Harbor's automated RPS checks had been limited to hard goods, but software, whether commercial packaged products or your homegrown code, must also comply with government export restrictions. That's why BEA Systems Inc. in San Jose became the first software company to use Open Harbor's service. Carey Garibay, BEA's senior director of sales, says that in order to comply with export laws, her company previously used "an extremely labor-intensive" manual process to check download source information. Given a daily average of 5,000 downloads, she says, Open Harbor's service freed a lot of folks from hard work. And, maybe, BEA's execs from doing hard time.
Fanatical fans, foolishness and fraud ...
... prompted Bill Schlough, CIO of the San Francisco Giants, to install the MailFrontier Enterprise Gateway from MailFrontier Inc., located in nearby Palo Alto. He says irate fans sometimes put team executives on endless mail lists, and on occasion, a user would, as he delicately put it, "practice poor e-mail etiquette," resulting in a deluge of spam from salacious sites. But it was the threat of fraud that prompted Schlough to get MailFrontier to protect his 150 business users. "Fraud pushed us over the edge," Schlough says. The elaborate schemes criminals use to get passwords, credit card numbers and other personal data "are hard enough for tech types to determine," so he doesn't expect end users to detect them. Because the virus crisis first hit in the 1990s and the spam slam only recently, Schlough, like most CIOs, has two separate vendors with distinct point products to fight the evil twin attackers of e-mail. But, he says, "an integrated approach may be our next step" for overall message management.

Track down security threats ...
... and even locate and monitor VoIP devices on your WAN when Neon Software Inc.