Many still don't realize that email isn't a secure mechanism for transmitting data. We've all heard the story about the sticky-notes with the password on the monitor. It takes a refresher periodically for people to acknowledge that your software vendor doesn't make perfect software, and even large organizations with sophisticated security can be compromised without a vigilent approach to security.

What's your take on the full disclosure of vulnerabilities?

I am a believer in the concept of full disclosure, but it must be done responsibly. There's no benefit in releasing an exploit for a particularly vulnerability before a vendor has had the appropriate amount of time to respond.

It's also the responsibility of the end-user to follow up with their vendor to ensure they are acknowledging security vulnerabilities and fixing them rapidly. Certainly one of the criteria users should use when choosing a particular software application or even operating system is the security history and the vendor's track record in responsible security practices.

Introduce Guardian Digital. When was the company started? How did it evolve?

Guardian Digital was started in early 1999 as an Internet security and services company. In our early days we focused on finding out what kind of problems companies were having with regards to security, and addressing them using existing products with our own modifications to address their specific requirements.


Many of our customers were very small businesses with very tight budgets and no existing IT staff. They were concerned about people reading their email, defacing their web sites, falling victim to the same types of attacks that took down Yahoo! and Amazon.

Very early on we received a call from one of our colleages at a customer's location implementing a Windows server for their public Web services. Trouble is that they did not take the necessary precautions to protect from the security vulnerabilities at the time, and the server was hacked thirty minutes after it was installed. The consultant for this company informed the customer, and they both chose to immediately bring in Guardian Digital for a more stable and resilient solution.

Learning through this experience and others, we built solutions to address these problems into our own products, thanks much in part to the merits of open source.

Today we remain committed to solving business problems using open source with specific regards to security and ease of management. The Internet is evolving rapidly, and new methods to manage security risks must evolve equally as rapidly.

The security improvements in our products reduces risk to not only cracker attacks, but also to financial risk, business downtime, and provides assurance that their customer's data will remain in tact.

The ease of management reduces support costs, provides a consistent configuration every time, and enables businesses with limited staff and experience with security and Linux to manage their Internet presence.