The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, launched two wars and ushered in sweeping new federal security laws. But they had little to do with making computers or the Internet any safer.

In fact, said retired FBI Special Agent C. David Shepherd, CEO of the Las Vegas-based Readiness Resource Group, public agencies and private-sector companies have always been trying to protecting their systems.

“I don’t think you can say this all started after 9/11,” said Shepherd. “It’s is a constant threat that you can’t put a date to. The bad guys had been doing this before 9/11 — as soon as somebody saw a way to make money or to get back at somebody.”

Tim Armstrong, malware researcher at Moscow’s Kaspersky Lab, agreed.

“I suppose it [9/11] had repercussions in a technological realm,” Armstrong said, “but I don’t think that there was such a direct correlation that IT people immediately said, ‘I better button up my server because these terrorists attacked a building.’”

Shepherd, the former chief of security for the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas, said the gaming industry had to protect its systems well before 9/11. Casinos keep on file the bank account information, Social Security numbers, home addresses and cellphone numbers of some of the richest people in the world.

“We had to protect everything we could, in every conceivable way,” Shepherd said.

Fitful advances

Advances in cybersecurity haven’t been driven by physical attacks or by government agencies so much as they have been by sheer necessity, Armstrong said.

“For example, the explosion of Java malware was a direct result of other technologies like Adobe catching up on their patch cycles,” Armstrong said. “Things that the cybercriminals relied on earlier became difficult to compromise, so they lost interest and moved to a different technology that hasn’t been so closely scrutinized.”

Armstrong said many corporations could do more in terms of cybersecurity, but don’t due to the expenses involved. It costs a lot of money for companies to review all the code for their websites, not to mention having a full-time security team on board and providing ongoing security training for all employees, he said.

“There’s also a certain amount of, ‘It won’t happen to our network,’” Armstrong said. “But Sony was hacked over 20 times in one month, because they’d fix one thing and not look at other things because it was just too expensive.”

The irony is that it costs more to fix a system once it’s been compromised, Armstrong said.

“The money spent reacting to breaches will be more than if you had [secured your systems] to begin with,” Armstrong said. “Consider the long-term loss of customers and the bad PR. But companies are hoping it doesn’t happen and it’s a gamble. C-level executives are saying, ‘If we spend all this money and nothing happens, is it wasted money?’ It’s hard for them to justify [the spending].”

Many companies, even large ones, don’t perform even the most basic tasks to protect their networks, Armstrong said. Shepherd agreed with that sentiment.

“We can never say that everything is secure, because every time you turn around, there’s someone trying to break into your system,” Shepherd said. “It is an ongoing process to secure your systems. When you say you’re secure, that’s your first mistake.”

Armstrong said many security breaches of the past few years could have been avoided.

“You have security flaws that are two, three years out of date that are left unpatched,” he said. “Maybe for a short time 9/11 had an impact, but I think in the long term, at least on the technology side of things, it really didn’t that have that great an impact.”

The problem now is that there are more and more people trying to break into systems, which means everyone has to stay vigilant in trying to protect their networks, Shepherd said.

“There’s no other way,” Shepherd said. “You have to stay on top of it. It’s the silent war that people aren’t paying attention to as much as they should.”

If cybercriminals want to compromise a company or a system, they will if they have enough time and the motivation, Armstrong said.

“If they want to get into your network, they eventually will,” Armstrong said. “There’s no 100 percent solution. … Add to that a lot of the companies out there [that] aren’t making some of the basic security changes to their networks, and you have a bad recipe there.”

The future of cybersecurity

One of the biggest threats facing the U.S. is a potential cyberattack that would impact national security, Shepherd said.

“Everyone is looking, or should look, at how to keep someone from knocking out our power, our water, our telecommunications,” he said. “If you look at when Russia attacked Georgia [in 2008] — that was preceded by a cyberattack that knocked out systems.”

“We need to pay more and more and more attention to cybersecurity,” Shepherd said. “It is an ongoing threat and it’s a continuous threat. You can be in any foreign country and try to hack into the systems here.”

Shepherd recalled the words spoken by William H. Webster, former head of both the FBI and the CIA and current chairman of the White House’s Homeland Security Advisory Council: “Security is always seen as too much until the day it’s not enough.”

Article provided by SecurityNewsDaily, a sister site to Laptopmag.com.

The dreaded moment has come and you can’t download a movie you want to watch, or install some games you want to play because your hard drive is full. What’s worse, you have no idea what to delete to make some room. Thankfully there are several apps you can turn to that will give you a good idea what’s using all of your drive space. Here are the top five, based on your nominations.

Earlier in the week we asked you which tools you used to scan your drive and give you a complete picture of what’s using all of your space. You definitely responded, and now we’re back to highlight the top five.

SpacesSniffer (Windows)

SpaceSniffer is a free, portable Windows utility that uses a tree-view to show you which areas on your hard drive take up the most space in a single view. Just scan your hard drive with the tool to see your hard drive, arranged in squares that represent which files and folders are using the most space. Click on any large block to see a breakdown of what’s inside that folder, also organized by what’s taking up the most space. You can also filter specific types of files from the scan, tag files and label them for review later, and search specifically for file types, modification dates, and more.

TreeSize (Windows)

TreeSize is a robust drive analysis tool that comes in multiple flavors. The free version is also portable, and gives you a quick, directory-oriented view of your hard drive arranged by the folders that take up the most space. Behind the folder names are progress bars that display their relative size to one another, so you can quickly pinpoint the ones that take up the most space. You can also expand any folder in the directory list to see its contents. In addition to the free version, TreeSize Professional and TreeSize Personal offer the features of the free version, the ability to export reports of your drive layout, the ability to see additional statistics on file types, ages, and modification dates, command line scanning, and more. TreeSize Personal will set you back $24.95 for a single user license and support, and TreeSize Professional will cost you $52.95 for a single user license and support. TreeSize Free is, as the name implies, completely free.

DaisyDisk (Mac)

DaisyDisk is the only Mac utility to make the top five, but it’s a great utility. The app, like most other disk utilities, scans your drive and displays its content in order of what’s taking up the most space, but instead of using a treemap, you get a fan-view (the developer calls it a “sunburst map,”) that extends out to the center, with similar files and folders grouped together at the base so you can see how they’re organized on the drive. DaisyDisk also lets you clean up large and unwanted files quickly, and analyze multiple disks and drives at the same time. Daisy Disk will set you back $19.99 regular price, but it’s on sale now for $9.99 in the Mac App Store.

WinDirStat (Windows)

WinDirStat is free, lightweight, comes in a portable version, and upon startup shows you the contents of your drive in three views: a directory-view, which displays your folder contents organized by how much space they’re consuming, an extension list that will show you what’s inside of the selected directory and how much of what types of files you’re using, and the graphic view at the bottom that highlights the contents of your drive in colored blocks that you can highlight or click on for additional information. Hover over a group of blocks to see the folder they’re in, or select a specific one to see what it is.

One of the biggest gripes from customers who purchase phones directly from a U.S. carrier (as opposed to unlocked) is that carriers aren’t always so quick to push out Android updates. Case in point — the unlocked Nexus One received its Froyo updates long before any other phone, and the Nexus S has seen updates faster as well.

AT&T is responding to customer demands, though: the carrier just announced that upgrades to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) are planned for all post-paid Android smartphones already introduced this year. That means that the Motorola Atrix 4G will get the update starting today, and HTC Inspire 4G owners will see it in the coming weeks.

The Atrix 4G update will allow users the ability to download applications from third-party stores, and if you own a Samsung Captivate, you can rest assured that your phone will get the update as well. Now will rival carriers take notice and catch up?

Beginning today and continuing over the next few weeks, Motorola ATRIX 4G users will be prompted to install the update. To download the update, users must be connected via Wi-Fi. In August, HTC Inspire 4G users will be notified that the update is available and can be downloaded when connected to a Wi-Fi network. AT&T smartphone users can access at any one of the company’s more than 26,000 Wi-Fi hotspots at no cost.

The AT&T smartphones planned for a Gingerbread update are:

HTC Inspire™ 4G
LG Phoenix™
Motorola ATRIX™ 4G
Pantech Crossover™
Samsung Captivate™ 4G
Samsung Infuse™ 4G

Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)

Gingerbread delivers a number of improvements, such as user interface refinements, refined copy/paste functionality and speed enhancements. The upgrade offers improved power management that offers a more active role in managing applications in addition to an improved on-screen keyboard with multi-touch support that makes typing faster and more accurate

It has been over three months since we firstbroke the news on the existence of Disco,the group messaging app made by the Slide team within Google. Google still refuses to talk about it. But work continues nonetheless. Today brings version 3 of the app — and the app is starting to get really good.

Just a little over a month after Disco wasupdated to version 2.0 with Push Notifications, today’s update brings a range of key new features. The biggest one is photo sharing, a feature which is now a must-have for all group messaging apps. Also new is 1-to-1 chat capabilities. But the most important additions may be the things Slide/Google is trying to do to help differentiate Disco from the rest of the pack. Namely, they’ve baked in Twitter and Yelp integration.

Yes, it may seem a bit weird for an app built within Google to rely on two rivals, but the features are interesting. Using the new “Star” commands, you can choose to follow any Twitter feed within a Disco group and see all the updates from that account within the app. You can also call up Yelp recommendations and reviews right from within the app with the new feature. Finally, you can also create a poll for everyone in the group using the Star options.

Disco also comes with a nice little bonus. If friends are not yet using Disco, you can still interact with them via SMS within the app. And the app will allow you to do this with up to five friends absolutely free of charge (though I assume they can still get charged for receiving the text).

While Google still won’t talk about Disco, perhaps it is ideal to just let that team do their own thing. Clearly, they are iterating fast minus all the oversight they might normally get as a regular group within Google. In just a few months, the Slide team has brought Disco from yet another group messaging client, into a really good one.

At the same time, the team is also working on other apps, like Pool Party, a group picture sharing app. I’ve been playing around with that for the past week, and it’s also pretty solid. If the slide team combined the two, it could be really interesting.

Of course, I’m also still interested to see how these Slide apps do in the face of Google+, which offers much of the same basic functionality. Google+ for Android has been out for over a week now, and it includes the Huddle group-messaging app. The G+ iPhone app remains in review, but should be out shortly — my guess would be next week.