Top 100 Network Security Tools
Updated list of Pen testing tools from insecure.org. Interesting to see that web app. tools are starting to make an appearance into the list (albeit mostly in the lower orders)

iKu Systemhaus AG - Sicherheit
Advisory about a new(?) character encoding issue. The problem for Internet Explorer appears to be that they handle the encoding correctly but that A-V /Filtering systems may not, essentially obfuscating attacks on the browser....

Ajax security basics
Interesting article on Security Focus looking at the security implications of AJAX technologies and also the implications for Penetration testing AJAX enabled applications.
In terms of the security risks of AJAX it will be interesting to see how well frameworks like Atlas and RoR take care of this for the developer. One thing I noticed in testing .NET v2 applications was the in-built input validation really cuts down on XSS and SQL Injection vulnerabilities, instead of the "old days" with classic ASP where I could virtually guarantee some kind of input validation problem somewhere...

SQL Power Injector Product Information
A new release of SQL Power Injector. Not a tool I've played with much yet, but could be cool to try it out in conjunction with the hacme stuff from foundstone...

Foundstone, a division of McAfee, Inc.
Seems to be tool-tastic at the moment. Foundstone have updated their hacme books and hacme bank site and released hacme travel and shipping!
Shipping is a Coldfusion app with a mysql database and travel is in C++ which should be interesting... (like the typo on the travel page which explains that the system suffers from common vulnerabilities such as "SQL injection and bugger overflows")

"Hacking iSeries" references and links
Just started to go through the blackhat europe 2006 media archives and found something useful to keep a note of (expect many more posts as I go).
iSeries (more commonly known as AS/400) is not something which there's a wide understanding of, both in IT security and pen testing (IME of course)
This site seems to have a load of good links and an eBook on hacking iSeries .. Also here's a link to the blackhat presentation which has a lot of good info. on the topic Hacking iSeries Presentation

Survey: gaping security holes - Network World
Some interesting numbers relating to security trends. It's not surprising really though it should be..
over half of companies admit they're not doing a good job of working out what's on the network (kinda' hard to patch a box you don't know you've got)
And probably the worst, over 25% of companies dedicate no resource to assessing the value of business assets.
the question is how are these companies doing risk assessments or Business Continuity Planning (with the cynical answer being..."Not Well")...

There's a new security tool called CAL9000 available over at the OWASP site here
Another one to look into...

TaoSecurity
Ethereals changing name to the snappy "wireshark ".
Sounds like good news to me for the very trivial reason that I always used to go looking for Ethereal at www.ethereal.org only to find that it wasn't there ;op

Nightmare On Wall Street: Prosecution Witness Describes 'Chaos' In UBS PaineWebber Attack - Yahoo! News
Article about a bank who suffered from an internal attack.
Regardless of whether the guy on trial is guilty or not, the numbers mentioned in this case are a good point for why internal security is something which requires a lot of attention. From the article, the defence case seems to revolve around the fact that the network had very poor security and as such there's no way to prove that it was the defendant that placed the malicious code...
the estimate is that $3.1 million was spent on repairing the damage alone and I'd guess that the loss from lost business and opportunity cost of people not being able to use systems is going to be pretty high as well.