These Alarms Give Peace of Mind

Protected Home’s (www.protectedhome. com) MiniAlarm Plus Motion Sensor and WaterAlarm Plus 2006 has won a Popular Mechanics Editor’s Choice Award. The MiniAlarm Plus features a PIR Motion Sensor that sounds a 130-decibel alarm when motion is detected.

The motion sensor immediately relays the alarm to the MiniAlarm Plus dialer, which easily connects to an existing telephone line, and automatically dials the property owner once the alarm is sounded. The MiniAlarm Plus dialer will automatically telephone and play a voice alarm message warning that the motion sensor has detected an intruder.

The WaterAlarm Plus helps to minimize water damage by alerting the homeowner via telephone when water is detected. Installed in minutes, the WaterAlarm Plus is ideal for detecting leaking pipes, appliances or toilets; burst pipes; or overflowing sumps or A/C condensing pans. When water is detected, the WaterAlarm Plus will sound an 85-decibel alarm to alert those in the residence. The WaterAlarm Plus also will automatically call the homeowner via telephone to warn of the situation.

Both products can accept any phone number up to 40 digits long, including calling card numbers and international numbers. The MiniAlarm Plus and WaterAlarm Plus both continue to call every 15 minutes until the user acknowledges the alarm and calls back to the monitored location to cancel the alarm call-out. The MiniAlarm Plus and WaterAlarm Plus have a suggested price of $125.00.

MySpace Partners With Child Safety Network

MySpace.com, the lifestyle portal where teens connect with friends, has teamed up with the Child Safety Network (CSN) to educate users about staying safe online. Through this partnership, MySpace will host a series of web-based banner advertisements that contain free resources and informational tips regarding important safety issues pertaining to the MySpace community. If selected, the banners direct users to the CSN homepage (www.csn.org).

The CSN’s homepage provides users with the opportunity to access CSN’s in-depth resources for online safety, including printable tips and safety suggestions. Members of CSN can also enter the US zip code for the area where they are living or vacationing, to view photographs and addresses of registered sex offenders in that area.

In addition to its partnership with CSN, MySpace will continue to provide users and parents with “Safety Tips” at the bottom of every page on the site, as well as educational information specific to online safety. Plus, MySpace will remain persistent with enforcing a minimum age requirement of 14 for users, while providing special protections for members under the age of 16. These special protections safeguard minors’ personal information so that it cannot be accessed by people they do not know.

The move from MySpace comes on the heels of negative publicity from law-enforcement agencies which advise that My Space and similar social networking sites may be used by sexual predators to contact vulnerable teens.

Anti-Malware Software Introducing Risks

According to a recent Nemertes Impact Analysis by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, SVP, Nemertes Research Inc., two items in the news highlight an important trend in security: Companies are struggling more and more with patches.

Symantec just released a patch for its Norton AntiVirus 10.x product to fix a critical security vulnerability that could have led to attacks against thousands of companies running the corporate anti-virus suite. And just two months ago, McAfee suffered from a flawed signature which caused it to misidentify documents and spreadsheets as malware. The flaw quarantined thousands of system files and documents in many companies before being corrected after a few hours.

In both of the recent cases, the anti-malware vendors acted very quickly to repair the flaws, avoiding a loss of trust from their customers. But patching and updating software is always risky and few software vendors seem to have adequate quality assurance and testing programs to avoid mistakes.

Based on their analyses, Nemertes believes IT executives should treat security updates like other software and make sure they test each one adequately. Operating-system virtualization software can help them build virtual testing environments without having to buy dozens of new servers or desktops.

Blade.org Delivers 2 Security Solutions

Blade.org, an open community dedicated to developing next-generation technologies for blade computing, has expanded its membership to 60 companies and is delivering two partner-driven, blade-based “security-in-a-box” solutions.

The first solution, from OpenService, Inc. is a real-time security threat and compliance management solution based on IBM BladeCenter. In this solution, OpenService ported its Security Management Center (SMC) to BladeCenter to provide a highly-available and scalable security information management solution. OpenService is also working with Blade.org partner Avnet to deliver security information solutions to the market. The solution collects, analyzes and correlates security event data in real-time from across the enterprise. As such, it centralizes the management of risks, vulnerabilities, real-time events and post-attack forensics, shortening the cycle of security threat identification and remediation.

The second solution is a Digital Video Surveillance Solution on IBM BladeCenter from DataCom Systems. By partnering with Blade.org members IBM and Avnet, DataCom is delivering a computing platform to manage and store the data from video surveillance cameras to safeguard an organization’s physical assets. The solution allows security personnel to remotely access, view and e-mail recorded video footage, helping speed interaction with law enforcement. Because the solution compresses images on a 64-bit video capture board, it frees more than 80 percent of the BladeCenter resources for enterprise applications.