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Christopher Frenz

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Top Stories by Christopher Frenz

If you watch the news regularly, it is easy to notice that in almost any given week some company seems to have experienced an electronic break-in or in some other way experienced a form of computer or network compromise. While computer security professionals can help to mitigate such risks via the proper configuration of firewalls, careful crafting of Access Control Lists, the application of updates, and the judicious application of file permission, among other measures, it's important that one of the most fundamental ways of improving the security of a computer or network resource not be overlooked - that of a really strong password. To this day passwords remain one of the weaker links in the security of electronic resources, and their potential for exploitation needs to be examined more carefully than ever. With the growing trend of cloud computing-based initiativ... (more)

Error Prevention in VS.NET

With the release of Visual Studio .NET and the structured error-handling capabilities of the .NET Framework came significant improvements in the way that VS programmers are able to capture and deal with programmatic errors. Yet these more robust abilities do not lessen the importance of one of the most time-tested means of error handling: prevention. In this article I will highlight various methods of data validation that can be used to eliminate potentially problematic errors before they have a chance to occur. Data validation checks any inputted data for potential problems pri... (more)

Windows for Supercomputers

In late May 2004, Microsoft made the announcement that it was considering entering the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Market, a market that has traditionally been dominated by custom-engineered Unix-based machines. In recent years, advances in technology have made possible the construction of lower-cost computing clusters that utilize off-the-shelf hardware such as Intel- and AMD-based processors. The operating system of choice for these lower-end clusters has been Linux. In fact, this market is representative of one of Linux's strongest footholds. Many in the Linux camp consid... (more)

The Open Source Advantage in Secure Application Development

The security benefits and risks of Open Source code is one of the most debated topics in information security today. The views of proponents of the Open Source model are typified by Eric Raymond's argument that Open Source software is intrinsically more secure since its open nature lets a greater number of programmers view the source code and uncover potential security threats before they're released to the wild. Fewer people see closed source software, on the other hand, and so the odds of uncovering a potential security threat before a system cracker finds it is diminished. Op... (more)

Your Computer's Immune System

Parallels have often been drawn between the computer security landscape and the biological world, since security threats such as computer viruses and worms can be viewed as digital incarnations of common biological threats.  Similarities exist in terms of modes of reproduction as well as infection, and some research even suggests that digital threats follow the laws of evolution that predict these threats will become more sophisticated and effective as time progresses.  A logical extension of this concept has always been to therefore consider the idea of computer security as a fo... (more)