I you are familiar with Information Security portals, you must remember SecurityWatch.com. The web site still hosts a screen saying "This site is currently being reconstructed. Please be patient.", which is there for at least a year now. If you didn't know, SecurityWatch.com was started and was run by Ubizen folks, so this was a good occasion to ask what happened to this, then well known, security portal.

"The web site was built on the old concept that was created by Yahoo!, where you get the income from advertising. After the dot com fall, advertising also collapsed. As a consequence, SecurityWatch couldn't be funded any more with the advertisments. It needed to have alternative revenue streams, and that's in fact what we have recreated within Ubizen. Now, you can get all the security bulletins, but it is now a paid service" - Carlo Schüpp explains.

The staff, that was backing up SecurityWatch from the content perspective, stayed in the company as a part of security intelligence lab and now are working on beefing security information for Ubizen's managed security services.

As for the security trends in 2002, Mr. Schüpp said that one of the biggest problems is http traffic as it can slide right through the firewall. The examples given were Code Red and Nimda infections that happened at the application level, bypassing the firewalls. Ubizen's response to this, is placing the security layer in front of a Website. Ubizen DMZ/Shield Enterprise examines every request to be sure it is a genuine Web request and is in line with security policies. If a request doesn't fit, it is rejected before any damage is done.




"There is also a big problem with Internet worms, as the level of knowledge for writing them has fallen to just needing to edit the Visual Basic code" - Mr. Schüpp noted in regards to ever growing number of Internet viruses and worms. While talking about dangers to the corporate networks, he sees the problems in internal people and ex-employees, as they know internal configurations and have possible access privileges. Ubizen's plans for 2003 are of course based on their managed security services, mainly attracting the new customers, upgrading the services and shortening the installation time.