THE MAGAZINE

The redesign continues, with graphics to help you spot and follow market trends.

Half of the corporate employees surveyed have saved a work e-mail outside the company network, and almost half have used corporate systems to send jokes, pictures, and “stories of a questionable tone” to friends. Yet 92 percent of these respondents believe that their e-mail use does not pose any risk to their employers.

Trojan horse programs—those pieces of malware designed to infiltrate a computer and then steal information to be sent back to an attacker—accounted for more of the malicious code in 2005 than worms. This indicates, according to researchers at antivirus firm Sophos, that criminals may be moving away from large-scale bombardments in favor of targeted attacks that could yield passwords, credit card information, and bank login credentials. @ The Sophos Security Threat Management Report is at SM Online

A data breach at ChoicePoint in February 2005 was “a watershed event in terms of disclosure to the affected individuals,” according to a paper from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Dan Sullivan, an author and security expert, has penned a comprehensive text that will help readers better understand how these losses occur and how to prevent them. The Definitive Guide to Information Theft Prevention is an eight-chapter e-book available for free (the e-book is sponsored by Permeo Technologies, a provider of secure remote-access solutions)

The next time you see Microsoft Windows’ “blue screen of death” or a “fatal error” message flash across your monitor, don’t get angry; reboot and then point your browser toward the DistroWatch Web site, where you can learn everything you need to know about the newest distributions (called “distros”) of the Linux operating system.

For novices or general security practitioners, on the other hand, the information can be bewildering. The information is too detailed and complicated for beginners.

The bits-and-bytes material is cushioned by rich context, with sections addressing the history of computer crime and the methods and mind-sets of computer criminals.

Mia Bloom, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, tries to explain what motivates suicide bombers.

The book covers these 19 programming flaws, which include the most devastating types of coding and architectural errors, such as buffer overflows, format string problems, cross-site scripting, and insufficient encryption.

Similarly neglected are the role of private-sector technology incubators, government funding and venture capital, as well as public-private and university partnerships, and the applicability of technologies to the civilian and security sectors.

Why is “No comment” the wrong response to any media question? According to the authors, those words precipitate questions such as, “What are you trying to hide?” and “What’s really going on here?” They offer tips on what needs to be said and how to say it.