Summary

The SANS News Browser provides current headlines and URLs for security, privacy, and virus news stories from more than 3,000 publications and news services around the world. The stories are generally posted within thirty minutes after the story appears on the publications. sites. It is useful for security professionals who need to be absolutely certain they don.t miss important security stories. You may keep the browser in a window on your Windows PC desktop. Whenever you see a story that sounds important, click on the headline to go immediately to the original story at the news site.

Versions are planned for other desktop platforms. If you would like to develop one of them, email info@sans.org with the subject Help develop the SANS News Browser for other platforms.

Orgins of the SANS News Browser

The browser was developed by Bob Gourley, a security manager and popular speaker who has done much to encourage security awareness and spread technical security knowledge. Bob has been providing similar software to information security professionals for over a year and has now provided the source code and a specialized version of the program to SANS for the use of the SANS community.

Safety

The browser is a Visual Basic program that constantly polls news pages maintained at the SANS web site. SANS asked two Windows security gurus to verify the safety of the program. Both Steve Gibson of Gibson Research (author of ShieldsUp! at www.grc.com) and Jeff Forristal of Neohapsis (editor of SANS weekly Security Alert Consensus) gave it a clean bill of health.

Downloading and Use

Download the latest copy of the SANS News Browser.

For the program to function, certain standard files must be installed on your PC. Most PCs have those files. If the browser does not run you may need to install one of those files. See the troubleshooting section below for more information.

Lisense

This program is provided by SANS as a free service to the Internet security community. You may tell others about it and/or give copies for free to anyone supporting the security community. The software is provided "AS IS" and all warranties are disclaimed.

Questions and Answers

Q: Where has this program been used?

A: This program has been in use for three years. It was created by the author as a personal tool, but since then has been in use in at several sites in US Government, state governments, and a variety of large companies in the private sector . This new version has a changed interface and a tighter linkage to SANS, but the bulk of the code remains unchanged.

Q: Can I get a look at the source code?

A: Absolutely. SANS will provide the source code to any information security professional who would like to review it. We would also appreciate suggestions for refinement of the code and the interface. The code is provided in Visual Basic forms, so you will need VB6.0 to read and re-compile it.

Q: I prefer Netscape but when I click on a story it opens in IE. Can I change that?

A: We are researching that one now.

Q: Where do you get the news from?

A: We use news feeds provided by Moreover.com. Moreover.com searches through over 3000 sources and we have tailored those news feeds for this product.

Troubleshooting

The program has been tested on Windows NT and Windows 98, and should run on any system that has the SHDOCVW.DLL and MSVBVM60.DLL's installed (these are normally installed with the operating system, so if you are running Windows NT or Windows 98 the program should run just fine. The DLL's are also available from the Microsoft web site).

• What is a DLL? A DLL is a Dynamic Link Library. It allows programmers to share functions among Windows programs. These libraries do all kinds of things, from holding icons to enabling visual basic to run (vbrun3.dll or MSVBVM0.dll) to creating network sockets that allow you to connect to the internet (winsock.dll).
• The most common error we hear about comes from not having the .dll called SHDOCVW.DLL. It is normally in the directory c:/WINNT/system32/ or equivalent. If it is not there, download it from the Microsoft web site.
• The second most common error we hear about comes from not having the .dll called MSVBVM60.dll. It, too, can be downloaded from Microsoft.
• Has been tested on Windows XP, ME, NT and 95