Pentagon pulls the plug on airborne missile defense system

By W.J. Hennigan – Work has ended on a futuristic airborne missile defense system built mostly in Southern California after more than 15 years of development and $5 billion in federal funding.

In what was once considered the stuff of science fiction, the airborne laser program involved a Boeing 747 jumbo jet equipped with an advanced tracking system and a massive laser gun on its nose to identify and obliterate enemy missiles as they blast off.

The Pentagon‘s Missile Defense Agency, which oversaw the airborne laser program, had asked Congress for more funding for this year but didn’t receive enough to keep the program going. [VIDEO 00:25] more> http://is.gd/eYSeUj

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Rethinking our Approach to Cybersecurity

By Brendan Hannigan – More often than not, companies are focusing on very narrow,siloed ways of securing their organization–for example, simply focusing on firewalls, database or application security. The issue with this approach is that there is no way of coordinating and communicating between the silos.

Whether it be a botnet installed on a laptop, an advanced persistent threat, or even their own employee willfully or negligently exposing confidential data, these threats can often be prevented by leveraging Security Intelligence:

1. Threat Detection
2. Government Regulations and Compliance
3. Operational Efficiency

The old ways of securing a company no longer work. more> http://is.gd/59txk7

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Fourth Amendment’s Future if Gov’t Uses Virtual Force and Trojan Horse Warrants?

Image by WeMeantDemocracy via Flickr

By Ms. Smith – You realize that “officers who remotely access the computer will not knock and announce their intention to ‘enter’ it to conduct” virtual force searches — not that knocking is necessarily required in real life search-your-house situations. You have the background info now, so next time we’ll assume this snooping software is designed so the malware goes undetected by antivirus. We will focus on how Brenner theorizes remote searches, with or without a warrant, could be justified as not completely trampling the Fourth Amendment. And in some cases, perhaps paving the way in the name of combating cybercrime and botnets, it is not considered to be “spyware.” more> http://tinyurl.com/cudkozb

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Are you ready for networking in the cloud?

Image via Wikipedia

By Jim Metzler – Recently, cloud service providers have begun offering a new class of solutions, which have historically been provided by the IT infrastructure group. In addition to the communications and collaboration, this includes network and application optimization, security, management and virtualized desktops.

We’re calling this new class of solutions Cloud Networking Services (CNS). The introduction of CNS presents the IT infrastructure group with a new challenge. more> http://is.gd/6YR1lM