Schneier on Security

Safeguard your messages today, and prepare for electronic commerce tomorrow

You may have just started using the Internet for your business, but scientists, academics, and computer programmers have been using it for years. It was designed specifically as a public network for sharing information. Because the availability of information was the priority, provisions for data security were not considered essential. But now that you’re sending proprietary business information over the Internet that openness can become a drawback. You need to take steps to protect your communications…

Macintosh users ignore computer viruses at their peril. Viruses can cause irreparable damage to the system or destroy megabytes of data. Fortunately, unlike their biological namesakes, computer viruses are relatively easy and painless to control. With a leading virus-protection software program, it takes only a few minutes a day to remain virus-free.

Macworld Lab tested four antiviral products—the freeware application Disinfectant, Central Point Software’s MacTools ($149.95), Symantec’s Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh (SAM, $99), and Virex ($99.95) from Datawatch—against every Macintosh virus known at the time of testing, 52 in all. We also looked at each product’s features and measured how fast the programs detected viruses…

Security problems have become almost as commonplace as desktop computers. A disgruntled city employee, trying to get back at the boss, digs into the mayor’s personal files and sends damaging information to the press. A woman asks her computer-expert husband to recover an accidentally deleted budget file; he recovers not only that file, but purposely deleted letters to an illicit lover. Or a major corporation loses critical financial data to an industrial spy who dialed in to a company file server.

Most of us have some computer-security vulnerability. Fortunately, software solutions can address mild concern through outright paranoia. Some security products will keep your kid brother from reading your files. Others will prevent a Mac guru from reading your files. Still others will bar the best Macintosh programmers in the industry from reading your files. Finally, some software will probably keep the spy agencies of large nations or the industrial spies of multinational corporations from reading our files…