Reading the HP security-acquisition tea leaves
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Blog: Having just acquired SPI Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard likely is going to acquire another security company sometime soon. But which one?
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NEW YORK -- Although the boardroom scandal at Hewlett-Packard Co. made the practice more widely known, buying phone records or other personal information obtained by ``pretext" calls appears to have been common in the business world.
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Blog: The Web application security company is to become part of HP's Technology Solutions Group. SPI Dynamics' tech is already integrated with HP Quality Center software.
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You know the name, but Google's probably not your first thought when pondering hosted security options. But a spate of recent buys indicates the company has serious designs on the space.
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(InfoWorld) - It happens every year: as the calendar gets ready to turn over, we get an itch to pause, to be quiet, to reflect. Thatâs probably why âyear in reviewâ stories are so popular at this time of year: they channel a seasonal compunction among editors and readers alike. But what to make of 2006? Itâs a year in which some enterprises and IT firms made bold moves to set themselves on a new course, while others failed, in spectacular fashion, to learn the lessons of the past. For this penultimate Tech Watch, we review the year with the aid of some pithy quotes. âIf I knew then what I know now, Iâd have done things differently.â -- Patricia Dunn, former Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Sometimes you come across a product or corporate initiative -- letâs take Sonyâs recent DRM spyware as an example -- that is so patently wrongheaded you canât imagine how it ever came to see the light of day. When you dig into the history of those decisions, you often find that they were made by people who were trying, earnestly, to solve a very specific problem without seeing how their âsolutionâ might affect the company as a whole. Thatâs what makes the scandal that led to the resignation of HP Chairman Patricia Dunn and the criminal charges against her, HP legal counsel Kevin Hunsaker, and three outside investigators all the more exceptional. These were the folks at the top of the totem pole. The dispute arose over the handling of an investigation by HP to see which members of its board of directors leaked information, including arguments about the ouster of former CEO Carly Fiorina, to the press. Hurd and other board members, it seems, became distracted by a âplumbingâ expedition, as it was called in the Nixon White House, and contracted with a company to use âpretexting,â a controversial technique where investigators pretend to be the people being investigated in order to access private information. Despite intense media and legal scrutiny, though, the squabble has not fazed HP shareholders or customers. Under Mark Hurd, CEO and newly appointed chairman, the company is fulfilling the promise of the controversial HP-Compaq merger engineered by Fiorina: It has overtaken Dell as the leading PC maker and IBM as the biggest IT company. The spy scandal has broad implications, however. Congress is now considering federal laws against pretexting, and increased oversight of corporate governance is becoming a shareholder rallying cry. --Marc Ferranti, IDG News Service ââFree has to have a price?â Thatâs nonsense.â -- Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz After years of staving off open source proponents, Sun Microsystems in November 2006 bit the bullet and made Java available via open source, and doubled down on that by offering up Java to the GNU General Public License, ensuring that revisions to Java are submitted back to the community at large. Naturally, the move raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them: Can Sunâs Java gurus adapt to the new paradigm and relinquish some degree of control? Looking at the evidence, it seems likely that Sun can. Java already has spawned a whole industryâs worth of open source projects such as the popular Spring Framework. Sunâs Solaris OS has thrived under open source. Inside Sun, however, not everyone shared Schwartzâs optimism. Graham Hamilton, a Sun Fellow for the Java team, departed the company over the momentous announcement, according to one insider. Outside Sun, IBM protested that it wanted Java placed under the jurisdiction of the Apache Software Foundation. Schwartzâs decision regarding Java will be remembered as a high point of 2006, and further proof that commercial vendors must find a way to ride, not fight the open source wave. -- Paul Krill âI am having personal difficulty looking veterans in the eye.â -- VA CISO Pedro Cadenas With mega blow-ups like the hack of CardSystems, many labeled 2005 the âYear of the Data Breach.â But that year seemed to extend, seamlessly, into 2006, as well. No incident epitomized the bumbling of sensitive data than the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairsâ loss of a laptop containing personal data of more than 26 million vets. The device in question was stolen from the home of a VA analyst, and was later recovered. Stories like the VAâs were sadly common this year. Chevron, GE, AT&T, Starbucks, and Wells Fargo all reported losing customer or employee data. One of the common themes in many cases was that data was being carried around, unencrypted, on portable PCs stolen from or lost by employees of third-party companies. That troubling trend bears out in a study that Vontu and the Ponemon Institute conducted this year, which found that 81 percent of the 500 companies surveyed âreported the loss of one or more laptops containing sensitive information during the past 12 months.â --Ted Samson âI wouldnât be surprised to see SaaS services (at) $5 per month, per user.â -- Josh Greenbaum, EAConsult 2006 didnât quite make it as âThe Year of SaaS,â but it came darn close. Spurred by the success of firms such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAS created SaaS CRM products with integration to their on-premises software as a differentiator. Even more important: SaaS providers, led by Salesforce, laid down a solid foundation on which to build new services in 2007 and beyond. Take, for example, AppExchange, an online market of sorts that Salesforce launched in October. AppExchange allows third-party providers to post their wares, and gives users the ability to pick and choose from applications and features that enhance the Salesforce.com software. AppExchange implies a recognition by Salesforce and, we can now assume, other SaaS providers that if enterprise-level companies are to adopt SaaS, then SaaS solutions canât be siloed. Integration of CRM with ERP, business intelligence and product lifecycle management are a must for the enterprise. -- Ephraim Schwartz âthe best season to visit Italyâ -- search query by Thelma Arnold, aka AOL user No. 4417749 Connect users to the world of information â¦ then betray their trust. Itâs not exactly the long-term strategy AOL had in mind, nor one to stay on top in todayâs Web 2.0-influenced Internet. Yet AOLâs infamous search data leak in August, which resulted in the ousting of CTO Maureen Govern, was just one headline head-scratcher involving the online giant this year. AOL, with its huge user base, has a track record of developing innovative new services to keep users loyal. That should have put the company at the forefront of the Web 2.0 wave that gave birth to sites such as FaceBook. But AOL, like other âold lineâ dot-coms Yahoo and Microsoft, proved too slow on the uptake, as firms with bigger visions and faster feet cherry-picked hot properties and left them standing on the sidelines. AOL hurt itself, too, with news reports of horror stories from customers who tried to cancel accounts, and a âbadwareâ label for AOL 9.0. By the time The New York Timesâ triangulated Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Ga., from the search record of AOL user No. 4417749, it was merely putting a face on AOLâs already eroding relationship with its expansive user base. By yearâs end, firms such as AOL and Yahoo were taking bolder steps to right their listing vessels: AOL dropped its subscription-services model and a quarter of its workforce, including CEO Jonathan Miller. Yahoo also shook up its boardroom, amid disappointing earnings and signs of discontent from senior management. Shortly before he lost his job, CEO Miller had observed in a keynote speech that âthe big companies will stay big companiesâ as the Internet evolves. Going into 2007, AOL isnât alone among big companies that are praying that adage rings true. -- Jason Snyder
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Scammers and hackers are targeting the human factor in system setups. Part of a series on hot security topics.
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No sense pointing the finger at Hewlett-Packard anymore; we have Congress and the FBI to do that. But I did want to discuss the âI didnât know what my employees/vendors/executive staff were doingâ defense -- which was, of course, made famous by Enron , so you have to know it just wonât do. Instead of looking backward, I spoke with a couple of experts on governance, privacy, risk, and compliance assessment about how companies can do the right thing in the future.
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InfoWorld - Hewlett Packard&#39;s acquisition of Web applications security specialist SPI Dynamics on June 19 illustrates a growing demand among enterprise customers to have vulnerability-scanning tools integrated into their software development platforms.
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HP today announced enhancements to its identity and access management software suite to help customers increase agility, reduce risk and cut costs in the area of security and compliance management.
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Blog: The Web application security company is to become part of HP?s Technology Solutions Group
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A customer filed a $54 million lawsuit against Best Buy for losing an $1100 laptop she took in for service. The reason, exposure to identity theft.  It's about time vendors were forced to recognize the value of customers' data. I recall how the chief genius at the Apple store in Emeryville complained that they would have to eat the cost of the drive in a deal they made with the manufacturer. Someday they'll have a clue that the data on most drives is worth far more than the hardware, and that their potential liability, if the data ends up in the hands of an identity thief, is also much greater.
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Backdoor drafts, security moms and up-armoring
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3Com makes a play for security. But is it enough for investors?
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I need to expand my idea of a secure computing ecosystem into the real world. Let me explain.
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For sale: A technology security company. Which one? Pretty much any of them.
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Company is readying security software or cell phones and handheld devices.
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Hewlett-Packard has launched the FOSSology Project, a tool for tracking and monitoring the use of free and open-source software within an IT environment.The project stems from governance work done in-house at HP, according to the Web site set up for the project.&quot;We needed a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open-source project was licensed,&quot; a statement on the site reads. &quot;Rather than simply collecting a project&#39;s advertised license (as given at their website or in their documentation), this tool needed to analyze all of the source code for a given project and intelligently report all of the licenses being used based on the license declarations and tell-tale phrases that identify software licensing.&quot;FOSSology is available under the terms of the GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2 and currently has support on most GNU/Linux platforms, according to the site.It is not clear from the site how HP plans to make money through the initiative. A company spokeswoman declined comment and said Friday that more details will be announced next week.Companies like Black Duck Software are already in the FOSS-tracking business.HP&#39;s entry brought a warm welcome from Black Duck CEO Doug Levin. Levin may feel HP&#39;s involvement will help the market expand overall. &quot;We can now officially welcome HP to our market,&quot; Levin wrote on his blog . &quot;FOSSology is a nice tool for developers. It will result in software developers being better informed about their use of GPL. That makes it a very worthy tool.&quot;Right now, the FOSSology project has modules for license analysis, MIME type identification and for extracting metadata, according to the site.The site said the tool already generates detailed results: &quot;More than simply reporting, &#39;Package X uses license Y,&#39; the FOSSology tool attempts to analyze every file within the package to determine its license. The license report is thus an aggregate of all of the different licenses found to be in use by a package.&quot;FOSSology&#39;s analyses aren&#39;t foolproof, however, a statement on the site concedes: &quot;In general, the analysis results are very good guesses but should not be considered authoritative. (Or to say it simply: We&#39;re not lawyers. The code tries its best, but leave the legal decisions up to your own attorneys.)&quot;Over time, FOSSology is meant to be far more than an open-source license tracker, according to the site. Future capabilities could address bug fixes and patches, security alerts, and code reuse, as well as analysis of all types of software.The effort prompted praise on Friday from Michael Cote, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;It&#39;s free and open source, which is nice,&quot; Cote said. &quot;So if the data is reliable and well-fed, it could be of help for people who don&#39;t want to work with Black Duck ... and others who have commercial ways to scan for open-source licenses.&quot;&quot;The interesting thing will be to see how open the resulting data is and how much reporting people do with it,&quot; he added. &quot;There&#39;s a sort of cloudy idea of how much open source is used in the enterprise, and having more accurate, free numbers would be great for the community, and more importantly, enterprises that want to get a feel for how widely used open source software is.&quot;The availability of free open-source usage data &quot;will help people make much better -- and affordable -- decisions about what open source to use and not use,&quot; Cote said.