[Infowarrior] - Securityfocus.Com Changes

[Richard Forno]

Change in Focus
SecurityFocus Staff, SecurityFocus 2010-03-10

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11582
Since its inception in 1999, SecurityFocus has been a mainstay in the  
security community. From original news content to detailed technical  
papers and guest columnists, we’ve strived to be the community’s  
source for all things security related. SecurityFocus was formed with  
the idea that the community needed a place to come together and share  
its collected wisdom and knowledge.

At the time, the security community was fairly fragmented with  
mainstream security information in its infancy. If you worked in  
security, it was difficult and frustrating to find the information you  
were looking for because it was scattered across a small number of  
mailing lists, sites and publications. There was no single place where  
a community of security professionals could go to get the information  
they needed and there was a unique opportunity to build a community  
portal that would provide its users with a destination and voice.
At SecurityFocus, the community has always been our primary focus. We  
knew then as we know now that providing the community with a place to  
share information, discuss new ideas and share technologies was  
critical to staying in touch with the constantly evolving threat  
landscape. With its purchase of SecurityFocus in 2002, Symantec became  
one of the first vendors to recognize the importance of maintaining a  
close relationship with the security community to the point where they  
made a commitment to its founders to continue to operate SecurityFocus  
as an independent company with the same mandate – “It’s all here – and  
it’s all free.”

The threat landscape has changed significantly over the past 10 years  
and so has the community. What was once a dispersed though vocal  
collection of users, researchers and analysts has become a much larger  
and more cohesive community of experts who have endeavored to make  
security more than just an after-thought. Vendors have also changed  
significantly, to the point where entire divisions are devoted to  
security research and education. Today, more information is shared  
openly within the community than ever before through the use of blogs,  
threat analysis, and whitepapers as vendors increasingly work with the  
community to solve today’s security challenges. The enormous growth in  
dedicated portals and alternative news sources such as social  
networking sites allows us to get our security news and information  
from a variety of sources and as a result, it makes sense for  
SecurityFocus to evaluate how best to serve its readers.

With this in mind, the time is right for SecurityFocus to focus more  
on its core components. Beginning March 15, 2010 SecurityFocus will  
begin a transition of its content to Symantec Connect. As part of its  
continued commitment to the community, all of SecurityFocus’ mailing  
lists including Bugtraq and its Vulnerability Database will remain  
online at www.securityfocus.com There will not be any changes to any  
of the list charters or policies and the same teams who have moderated  
list traffic will continue to do so. The vulnerability database will  
continue to be updated and made available as it is currently.  
DeepSight and other security intelligence related offerings will  
remain unchanged while Infocus articles, whitepapers, and other  
SecurityFocus content will be available off of the main Symantec  
website in the coming months.
While the news portal section of SecurityFocus will no longer be  
offered, we think our readers will be better served by this change as  
we combine our efforts with Symantec Connect and continue to provide a  
valuable service to the community. As always, if you have any  
questions or concerns you can reach us at editor-at-securityfocus-dot- 
com.