After toiling away to create a small but exclusive website, Charly wanted to run a security scanner against it to check for vulnerabilities. The choice of tools is enormous, but Charly chose w3af.

To celebrate 10 years of his column, Charly sets up a sensitive detector that measures the cosmic background radiation of the Internet.

The Anonymous Hacktivist group has been in many headlines this past year. Who are they? What did they attack? How do they communicate?

The Wireshark free network sniffer rolls out 1.6 release with advanced features.

BackTrack, an Ubuntu-based penetration-testing distribution, offers "major improvements" over previous releases, including support for 32- and 64-bit architectures, KDE 4, Gnome, and Fluxbox.

Snort is the de facto standard for open source network intrusion detection. The developer community has kept a fairly low profile for a couple of years, but extensions like Snorby, OpenFPC, and Pulled Pork have given the old hog a new lease on life.

Red Hat announces IBM, Accenture, Alfresco, Cisco, HP and Intel representatives are scheduled to deliver keynotes at the seventh annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, May 3-6, 2011 in Boston, Massachusetts.

If you need to monitor very large networks, you need powerful software. OpenNMS offers serious monitoring capabilities in a truly open source package.