The heyday of massive salaries, extravagant raises and unrestrained bonuses that this industry experienced at the start of the 21st century has long since passed by the information security professional.

The IT security pros who declared victory over spam surely are eating their words now that mass waves of unsolicited email have returned to inboxes.

Another buySymantec announced its intention to acquire enterprise management software provider Altiris in an $830 million deal. The purchase, intended to better Symantec's standing in the endpoint-management market, came as Symantec representatives said that endpoint security and management markets were converging.

The theme in the labs this month was policy, policy and more policy. Lab manager Mike Stephenson looked at email content filtering, which depends on policies for its success, while reviewer Justin Peltier evaluated policy management products. In these two areas, policy determines success, but the two views are quite different.

When the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) recently announced that hackers had compromised a database of more than 800,000 people associated with the university, perhaps one of the most shocking aspects of the event was how long the bad guys had gone undetected. The hackers accessed information for over a year before security personnel at UCLA suspected any malfeasance.

As part of SC Magazine's year-end roundup, the U.S. editorial team compiled lists of the most memorable - and sometimes most outrageous - news to cross your screen this year.

At the height of its hype cycle, XML was supposed to solve the "interoperability problem," but in the end, only had a marginal level of success that was better than any other file format. In much the same way, many legacy spam detection techniques promised to rid us of much or all spam. Instead, they fell short of their promise and, in many cases, just did not work.

Today one out of four emails on the internet is an image spam message. This is not because spammers have just realized the marketing benefits of captive colors. Instead, this is because the spammers have identified a weakness in many anti-spam systems and are moving diligently to maximize this opportunity by fully exploiting this weakness.

Shake-up at McAfee An internal McAfee probe spurred by Securities and Exchange Commission inquiries has led to a shake-up at the security giant. George Samenuk retired as chairman and CEO, while Kevin Weiss was fired. Board of Director Dale Fuller took over as interim president and CEO, while Charles Robel, another board member, was named chairman. A special committee's investigation determined insiders were participating in a questionable stock options practice known as backdating. News of the departures led some analysts to conclude that McAfee is ripe for acquisition. Fuller said: "All options are on the table."

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