Last week's enhancements to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and the creation of a new company for managing the standard should help alleviate some core issues related to its adoption, analysts said.

Security experts say that the mass-mailing threats of the past are becoming fewer as awareness is now more widespread. But don't relax your guard. Criminals are shifting to targeted means to extract assets from known and designated sources, and you could well be in their crosshairs.

News that a nine-year-old encryption method -- one that underlies the protection of virtually all secure online communications -- appears to have been cracked by a team of three Chinese researchers has spurred encryption experts around the world to issue a call to action.

Macquarie Telecom has become the first Australian telecommunications and hosting provider to be certified by SAI Global to ISO 27001 Information Security Management Systems (ISMS).

Windows XP, Microsoft's most popular operating system, sports the same encryption flaws that Israeli researchers recently disclosed in Windows 2000, Microsoft officials confirmed late Tuesday.

EMC's RSA group plans to acquire data leak protection vendor Tablus.

The good news: by 2010, computers should match the human brain in processing power. The bad news: by decade’s end, wireless-based viruses, hacking, and security breaches will be a major headache for IT administrators.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has officially launched its online census collection application, dubbed eCensus, which could integrate with the proposed Department of Human Services' Access Card at the next census in 2011.

Jim Stallings is two months into his job as general manager of IBM's mainframe System z division. In an interview this week with Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau, Stallings mapped out some of his plans, including security, the training of 20,000 mainframe workers by 2010 and the prospect of new specialty processors.

IT managers should focus on explaining business risk, customer impact, regulatory requirements and due diligence when justifying the need for IT security investments to corporate executives.

Why didn't this happen sooner? Seagate Technology has just announced a hard disk drive for laptops and other mobile devices that automatically encrypts all data as it goes into and comes out of the drive. Result: Nothing on the drive is accessible unless you know the password. If you lose your laptop with a drive like this installed, that's all you lose. The data is safe from prying eyes -- a thief can't even boot it up.

RFID will someday revolutionize business, but that won't occur until serious security issues are resolved.

RSA Security late last year acquired privately held Cyota, which offers online security and anti-fraud services to help financial institutions protect consumer accounts. CEO Art Coviello recently sat down with Ellen Messmer to discuss the Cyota acquisition and RSA's views on the future of authentication. With its anti-fraud services for banks, Cyota is a very different type of business than RSA Security traditionally has been in with its SecurID products for two-factor authentication and the BSAFE encryption toolkits.

Michael Barrett, CISO of PayPal; Joseph Moorcones, vice president for worldwide information security at Johnson & Johnson; and Lynn Mattice, vice president and CSO for Boston Scientific, are among the industry's most outstanding CISOs. Here these well-respected security executives offer their insights on New Data Center-style, next-generation security, as well as give tips for securing everything from budgets to WANs.

The man who almost single-handedly invented desktop encryption, Phil Zimmermann, is to demonstrate a new telephony-oriented encryption program at this week's Black Hat security event in Las Vegas.