Ibrahim Haddad

One of most exciting areas to emerge in information security has been honeynets. These networks are designed to be compromised in order to capture all the tools and activities of the attackers. We had the opportunity to talk with members of the Honeynet Project, a nonprofit security research organization, and the group's founder, Lance Spitzner, about their latest book, Know Your Enemy: Learning About Security Threats, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 0-321-16646-9). We asked many questions and discovered some surprising truths about security. Read on for the rest of the story. LWM: What is the Honeynet Project? Honeynet Project: It's a volunteer organization dedicated to researching and learning about cyber-threats, and sharing the lessons we learn. We're made up of 30 security professionals worldwide. We learn about cyber threats by deploying networks around the wor... (more)

At Last, You Have Alternatives: Switch to Firefox and Thunderbird

Firefox and Thunderbird are Open Source products that are made available by the Mozilla Foundation. Open Source development lets anyone who wants to to examine the source code, or if they wish, to modify it. There are a number of advantages to Open Source development, including the fact that many people look at the code every day, which results in better responsiveness as bugs are uncovered. This dynamic development community is able to provide continual feedback to make the product better, paving the way for a better browsing and e-mail experience for everyone. We met with Marc... (more)

Is the Open Source Development Model Right for Your Organization?

The open source development model has unique characteristics that make it in some instances a superior model for developing software compared to the traditional software engineering cascade model. As with other practices, the open source development model had its advantages and inconveniences. Will adopting the open source development model improve the way your corporate developers work and produce software? What are the best practices from the open source development model that we can use in a corporate environment? The open source software development model has a different proce... (more)

Good and Bad Reasons to Open Source Your Software

A company's decision to contribute to open source projects is usually business-driven. This article offers a review of the top reasons that can influence your company to contribute source code to open source or to start new open source projects. 1.  Provide a reference implementation to a standard: Open source is a potential venue to launch reference implementations of a specification or standard, with the added benefit that such implementations can gain faster acceptance than if they were kept proprietary. Examples of companies that launched open source projects to provide a refe... (more)

The Unofficial How-To of Open Sourcing

Open source software is shifting the software industry into a new paradigm, moving from developing proprietary code behind closed doors to developing code that can be shared, modified and redistributed openly. Key benefits associated with this shift is reducing development cost and software components complexity, developing re-usable common-off-the-shelf software assets, while increasing flexibility and using common enablers. Organizations that embrace the open source model and follow it when it influences positively their ways of building software, will increase their chances to... (more)