Dissemination of security information on the Internet

Mailing lists

There are many security orientated mailing lists on the Internet; these four, at least, are essential. You can get any of them by sendmail mail to the URL listed below:

Vendors

Vendors often have their own security mailing lists; in addition, they usually have an ftp or WWW site that provides patches and other information. ISS keeps a good list of these on-line. CERT also has some interesting information about vendors and their OS vulnerabilities. SGI has an very nice page on various places to get web information and patches, as well as locations of mailing lists and other niceties in their "information vault".

Newsgroups

Newsgroups (aka netnews, Usenet, etc.) have fallen slightly out of favor, but they still contain a plethora of information about security on the Internet, and are a fine resource if you have a general question or simply would like to keep up to date on the latest security issues and problems.

Miscellaneous Internet sites of note

Books & papers

Although not always on the WWW, I feel that I should point out several very good written resources/references; these lists were created by my pal Aleph1 (who is a very smart and cool guy and the maintainer of the aforementioned bugtraq mailing list and underground.org WWW site):