This week the Ponemon Institute released a study of almost 600 IT security professionals who overwhelmingly reported an increase in advanced threats and a lack of proper security mechanisms to deal with them.

More and more applications are moving to cloud and more users are moving off-premise.

Multiple vulnerabilities were reported in Adobe Flash Player. A remote user can cause arbitrary code to be executed on the target user's system. A remote user can conduct cross-site scripting attacks. A remote user can cause denial of service conditions.

When pitching venture firms, entrepreneurs typically include a slide that shows revenue curving sharply up and to the right shortly after launch – what’s known as the “hockey stick” – but even the best companies rarely meet those projections.

In the past, firewalls worked based on their protocol to apply to all available applications. Next generation firewalls, like those being developed by Palo Alto Networks need to better control apps to protect the network. This Info Tech report discusses next-gen firewalls and how compliance and application usage is changing the role of the firewall in network security.

Other than obliterating productivity, Facebook represents a substantial security risk in the corporate world. However, it's also becoming a powerful marketing tool. So, how do you leverage Facebook without opening the company up to all kinds of malware?

The iPad app that was famous for a few hours, a web browser that strips away adverts, and the man who bought his local police website as revenge for a speeding ticket.

Brokerages and other financial services firms turning to sites like Facebook and Twitter for marketing and customer outreach face a number of thorny social media compliance issues.

The life of leisure has been postponed. Instead, Michael Lehman has gone back to the future in a sense, taking on the CFO role at Palo Alto Networks, a pre-IPO company in the enterprise network-security industry.

For seven years the Silicon Valley Leadership Group has asked member companies in high tech, biotech, financial services and related industries to participate in a business climate survey.

Nir Zuk, founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks, is passionate about technology, and has little patience for large, slow-moving bureaucracies.

Nir Zuk, founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks, is passionate about technology, and has little patience for large, slow-moving bureaucracies.

You've heard the buzz about next-generation firewalls -- intelligent firewalls that dig deeper than port number and into application visibility.

While social media is pervasive in organizations worldwide, usage has far outpaced controls, according to the latest study conducted by Palo Alto Networks.

The spread of social networks in the enterprise is happening at a far greater rate than is generally believed, according to a report just released by network security firm Palo Alto Networks.

Sure, social networks are all the rage on the consumer Web, and industry observers have noted that enterprises aren't far behind. But the rush to embrace social technologies carries a heightened security risk, experts warn.

Palo Alto Networks surveyed Web application usage at 347 organizations and found Facebook, Twitter and other programs for communications and collaboration are all being used in enterprises to a great degree. Some 22 Google applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Wave, showed particularly strong usage, according to research from the network security firm.

Palo Alto Networks surveyed Web application usage at 347 organizations and found Facebook, Twitter and other programs for communications and collaboration are all being used in enterprises to a great degree. Some 22 Google applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Wave, showed particularly strong usage, according to research from the network security firm.

New reports from Palo Alto Networks and Webroot indicate that security consciousness is growing among social networkers but so are the risks, especially in highly regulated industries. Channel Insider takes a closer look at what this means for the channel.

Technology drives just about everything we do, and not just at our jobs. From banks to hospitals to the systems that keep the juice flowing to our homes, we are almost entirely dependent on tech. More and more of these systems are interconnected, and many of them are vulnerable. We see it almost every day.

The RSA Conference is wrapping up, and it was a much more upbeat experience than the past couple of years. Exhibitors were happy with the booth traffic, many interviewed executives reported sizable year-over-year revenue gains, and most were optimistic about prospects for the balance of 2010.

With the hue and cry at this year’s RSA Security Conference in San Francisco about the lack of security for users in the mobile “cloud,” it begs the question: what are people doing about it?

Next-generation firewalls from Palo Alto Networks combine three identification technologies to provide the unprecedented visibility and policy control over applications, users and content – all in a high-performance firewall platform.

The adoption and usage of Enterprise 2.0 applications in the workplace is growing at astronomical rates. While there is ample proof of the business benefits of their use, there continue to be major security and compliance risks associated with them.

The growth of applications like Twitter and Facebook over the last year has been astounding. At Palo Alto Networks, Worldwide Marketing VP Rene Bonvanie says that presents a problem for many employers.

Firewalls first came out in the late 1980s when security breaches drew attention to the need to make networks more secure. In those early days, just having a firewall made a network more secure, because hackers hadn’t yet written applications that could get around it. But as hackers have created new applications, the firewall has become like a utility belt with more and more necessary gadgets—URL filtering, content filtering, intrusion detection—to block new threats that can dodge the firewall’s port-based security.

There’s a great article on SearchEnterpriseWAN about a Palo Alto Networks customer. IDT spoke to SearchEnterpriseWAN about its experiences using next-generation firewalls from Palo Alto Networks, and discussed some of the benefits and changes their team recognized in managing security across their enterprise.

Wide area network (WAN) operations should include more than security management, but one global telecom operator drowning in thousands of firewall requests for its data centers around the world found little time to do much else.

2009 InfoWorld 100 Awards: IT remains the lifeblood of forward-thinking organizations, as this year's recipients of InfoWorld's highest honor attest.