Features

As an alternative to costly proprietary tools, we sourced a variety of open source software, with the goal of emulating as much of the feature-sets offered by closed source products, such as EnCase and ProDiscover.

Unlike the data acquisition tools here, WinTasks is intended to give administrators a view of the running state of a system, helping to identify and track malicious activity.

EnCase from Guid-ance Software has been at the vanguard of forensics software for some time - and with good reason.
Now in version 4.14, the solution is a powerful ­ collection of correlation and analysis tools, designed to make the forensic investigator's job as easy as possible.

Known as Megabeam until late last year, Swisscom Eurospot is able to offer service at more than 1,100 venues.

The Cloud, a division of Inspired Broadcast Networks, is something of a low profile public Wi-Fi network, preferring to stay in the background as a wholesale wireless network operator.
When the service was launched earlier this year, the company offered access through two options, pay-as-you-use sessions from a variety of outlets, or through third parties, such as BT OpenZone, whose users can now roam seamlessly onto The Cloud's network.

Wayport has been something of a pioneer for road warriors, offering telephone-enabled cubicles - known as Laptop Lanes - at major airports across the U.S.

One-factor authentication (user IDs and password) is still the most widely used method, primarily because it is simple, easy and there are no pieces of hardware to configure. But there are many applications where this is just not secure enough. In two-factor authentication, not only do users need to know a PIN but they also need to possess the correct token. This higher level of security, combined with the token's memory and cryptographic processing capabilities, makes it particularly attractive as a solution for many situations such as digitally signing documents and mails and authenticating the user remotely for access to corporate networks through VPNs.

Managing a network has never been easy, whether it comprises 100 or 100,000 machines. Even with a dedicated network administrator, the overheads are horrendous. Rolling out new applications, checking for non-licensed software, looking at network traffic... full-time tasks that often have no one with a full-time job to attend to them. This becomes even more worrying when you consider the security implications.

All your personal needs for sign-on can be secured and at the same time simplified by Password Officer Deluxe. This suite is essentially a repository for an individual's passwords so that he or she doesn't have to record them, but it also manages them in several important respects that make the sign-on process to any system, program, database, web site or other resource easier and safer.

CyberAngel is actually one of several competing packages on the market in the U.S. and Canada that allows a central monitoring station to detect when an unauthorized access to a PC or notebook has taken place, and alerts the owner accordingly.

PDAs are so portable as to make them susceptible to loss or theft - in a business environment the net result of this can range from inconvenience and embarrassment, right on up to serious problems with the regulatory authorities. Which is where SafeGuard PDA enters the frame. Like similar offerings from F-Secure and Pointsec, the software is designed to make a Pocket PC-based PDA as secure as electronically possible.

Cyber-Ark's Inter-Business Vault is designed to protect confidential files in an extranet environment, where secure file sharing with remote offices and business partners is demanded. This requires a combination of secure file storage, encryption for files in transit, authentication and access control. There are many products that tackle these problems individually. For example, a virtual private network (VPN) encrypts files in transit, and access controls are built into modern operating systems. However, OS access controls can often be bypassed simply because unhardened operating systems are themselves so easy to compromise. Inter-Business Vault aims to address all of these problems by integrating a VPN, authenticated access controls and encrypted file storage in a very secure solution.

As any security administrator knows, the only thing as bad as not enough information is too much. Staying on top of the overwhelming flood of information from every device is a difficult job. Information comes in as events, alerts, notifications of changes or just status updates. Making sense of it all requires efficient correlation tools, like the Network Intelligence logging appliances.
Network Intelligence sent us the HA 2000, the smallest version of its enterprise-class product suite, fitting in between the EX series targeting SMEs, and the LS series for large environments. The system runs Windows 2000 Server in a 2U rack-mount chassis. The HA 2000 is licensed to handle a maximum of 2,000 events per second (EPS), from a maximum of 64 information sources. There are several larger versions available (chiefly a matter of licensing, although at 4,000 EPS the devices start shipping with more on-board disk and memory), up to 6,000 EPS, for monitoring up to 1,024 network devices. And they can be clustered, up to three units together for triple the throughput.

Mail-Lock falls into a new category of email protection software, which the vendor calls email personal information containment, or EPIC for short. The software is claimed to allow users to carefully control what recipients of email can do with the messages and certain types of attachments. It does this using encryption technology to limit the functions within Outlook, as well as the length of time a message can be viewed by the recipient. The time control element is, as far as we can determine, the package's unique function within the POP-3/SMTP environment.
This version of Mail-Lock is designed to function as an add-in for Microsoft Outlook in all its desktop Windows variants, protecting the text of the email, as well as MS-Word, Excel and Powerpoint attachments. If an attachment from another application is attached and sent, Mail-Lock cannot control what happens to the attachment at the recipient's PC: it will simply open as normal. The company is developing versions for Outlook Express and Lotus Notes users, but no timescales for the updated releases have been made.

The U.are.U Pro for Active Directory from Digital Persona is, as its name suggests, a product to bring biometric identity verification to a Windows Active Directory environment (including Windows Server 2003). It may be fully integrated at server level or used on a standalone workstation.

Now in version 3.6, the Tsunami VPN appliance sports a simpler management interface and new tools for managing access rules, as well as the ability to send password expiration warnings to remote users who authenticate against NT domains.

This product is built upon Sun's very secure Trusted Solaris 8 operating system, which has been used by the U.S. Department of Defense for over 25 years. It is a hardened version of the Solaris operating system platform for deployment of high-security desktops, database servers, firewalls, and communication gateways.

Many companies are looking to secure their networks from wardriving attacks and the current advice is to put a VPN behind a wireless access point. With this in mind, the following product should be ideal. The aim of the product is to secure access to network infrastructure from wireless clients using the wireless transport layer security (WTLS) protocol, which is a wireless version of SSL.

An ingenious little device from Meganet Corporation to enable secure portable data storage, the USB token incorporates a fingerprint biometric sensor and a simple interface of 3 LEDs to inform the user of status.

Guardware produces a variety of innovative products, all of which have been well received. It was interesting, therefore, to see a keyboard product with integral fingerprint reader from this Hungarian company (although the keyboard is actually made in China).