Jeff Vance of NetworkWorld put out a great piece a few months back on how a Data Leak Prevention tool running at George Washington University averted what could have been a major security risk to Vice President Dick Cheney. But while this technology clearly has a tremendous security upside, will pervasive use of this technology lead us down a China like censorship path?

If you're responsible for the security of your network and its data, you might want to shift your focus away from looking at your network from the outside in, and look at it from the inside out.

From a threat perspective, insider attacks can be thought of like an Al Qaeda element operating within your walls. You might not see the threat or an actual attack on a daily basis, but you know the threat exists and you must plan for it. Similarly, attacks from the outside can be thought of as a Hamas-like element that exists outside your corporate boundary. Hamas-like attacks are more predictable and identifiable in nature, and as a result are easier to plan for. While both threats are serious, it's the attack from within that always comes as a surprise.

Interop 2008 -- less circus, more substance. The major themes revolved around data centers. Switching and virtualization were top of mind with announcements from Cisco, Extreme, and various software vendors supporting virtualization. Some interesting demos and road-mapped items were discussed as well.

If you're like me, then you have a drawer full of USB thumb drives that you've collected from vendors over the years. Whenever I'm in a rush, I pop one out, copy some data to it, and transport it to its destination. Then what do I do? I usually leave it around like I do pens, sticky notes, and CD-ROM's. And while I encourage you to steal my sticky notes, I care a lot about protecting my thumb drives from theft. If you're not taking seriously the threat that removable devices pose to your network, now's the time to pay attention.

802.1X sounds simple enough. Enable the switch ports, set up Radius and supplicants, and you're ready to go. But the reality is that common network scenarios are made vastly more difficult where 802.1x is deployed.

This is good news for multihypervisor shops. Microsoft pushed out the beta of VMM today, which includes management support of VMware.

The Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect announced Metadata Access Point, IF-MAP, a specification to aggregate and propagate events from multiple sources. IF-MAP is the best thing since sliced bread.

Vizioncore announced availability today of vCharter Pro as an enterprise-class performance monitoring and management solution for ESX shops.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is coming on April 29, which means NAP will be coming to an OS near you. Already, Hewlett-Packard has announced it will integrate network access protection with its ProCurve identity driven management product, which provides identity-based management to network access. We can expect more vendors to follow suit.

Nimsoft and Indicative Software, both tested in our APM Rolling Review, came together earlier this month as Nimsoft acquired the company and added its synthetic monitoring to the Nimsoft portfolio. The products are complementary, and the merger makes sense. With only about $5M in revenue, it was difficult for a standalone synthetic transaction product like Indicative to survive in the competitive APM market.

Starting at 11 a.m. on April 22, InformationWeek's virtual trade show will open its doors. We have fielded a list of presenters that cover various topics surrounding NAC.

In an effort to fight back against a massive amount of phishing attacks against PayPal, the e-commerce company recently announced that it will soon force customers who want to use its service to upgrade to browsers that have the latest phishing protection, such as Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, and Opera 9. Additionally, PayPal also is working diligently with ISP's to filter fraudulent phishing e-mails by dropping messages that lack a valid digital signature. But can you believe that some are crying foul?