SerNet News

Dear customers, partners, suppliers, dear friends,

we wish you all a healthy and happy new year 2015! Like every time through the course of the last 18 years we did not send Christmas cards or presents and we hope that you like us giving donations instead to people and organizations that deserve it.

In 2014 we spent a little more than EUR 14,300 to support 5 institutions. We do not name them to the public and we do not show big checks in front of the press. Charity for marketing purposes is indecent, if you ask us.

I wish to express my gratefulness to everybody who did something for our success. I will do my very best to get this continued during the next year.

Göttingen and Berlin, Dec 30th 2014 - yours sincerely - Johannes Loxen

SerNets EnterpriseSAMBA 4.1.14 has just been released. Packages for various SUSE and RedHat platforms as well as for Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu are available:

• Download SAMBA 4.1.14 packages

These packages address a lot of issues, which are listed in the changelog. To access the packages, a registration at the EnterpriseSAMBA Portal is necessary.

verinice 1.9 is available for download. The open source tool for the management of information security (ISMS) now integrates the updated VDA 2.0 questionnaire. In addition, the verinice team at Göttingen based SerNet GmbH made creating reports, managing users, groups, and permissions a lot easier.

"The catalog of the Association of the Automotive Industry (German VDA) for an Information Security Assessment (ISA), is included since verinice 1.2 and proved to be very popular," says verinice team lead Alexander Koderman. The VDA catalog has now been completely revised and adjusted to the new requirements of ISO 27001: 2013. As VDA ISA Standard 2.0 it is implemented in verinice 1.9. All changes were made in close cooperation with the working group of the VDA. Koderman: "When it comes to the conformity of the standard in verinice to the questionnaire, we can guarantee 100% accuracy."

"The catalog is also of interest outside the automotive industry," notes Koderman. The term 'Auto' is not mentioned once, he says with a wink. "Instead, the catalog grants easy access to information security management, even for beginners." Especially for smaller companies who don't want to work with ISO 27001 or basic protection, this is attractive. "At it-sa 2014 in September we again experienced how high the demand for such opportunities actually is." So he's confident that the ISA standard VDA 2.0 in verinice will address a wide audience.

Another bonus: If you have worked with the previous version, you can import the results into the ISA standard VDA 2.0. Koderman: "It was important to us that existing users may experience as little effort as possible for the update and the re-evaluation." Thanks to the so-called 'unify function' users do not have to start from scratch.

The innovations in the server extension verinice.PRO include a completely new user and group management. Likewise, the dialog for assigning access rights to objects (read and write) has been simplified. "In terms of user-friendliness we again took a big a step forward," says Koderman. Working with verinice daily or getting started will be much easier.

The central report repository makes vDesigner generated reports available for all users of verinice.PRO. Even in offline mode, the reports are accessible. In addition, reports can be stored local - e.g. for confidential evaluations. Output formats (DOC, XLS, PDF ...) can be arbitrarily set - in addition can now be individually stored on company policy templates customized server-wide default.

The SAMBA team at SerNet published the new EnterpriseSAMBA packages version 4.1.13. They are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and CentOS 7 as well.

• Download SAMBA 4.1.13-Pakete

These packages address a lot of issues, which are listet here. Please note that you have to register at the EnterpriseSAMBA Portal in order to access the packages.

"SAMBA" proves to be a popular brand. Deutsche Telekom recently named a software solution for mobile applications SaMBa! - but obviously forgot about the already existing and protected open source software SAMBA. Goettingen based SerNet GmbH, who holds the trademark for SAMBA in Germany on behalf of the international SAMBA team, could convince Deutsche Telekom to sign a cease and desist letter as well as to rename their product within six months.

In late September Deutsche Telekom launched a software which puts smartphone apps in a foreclosed container. The name: SaMBa! (Safe Mobile Business Apps). However, since the early 1990s SAMBA exists as an open source project (<link http: www.samba.org external-link-new-window>www.samba.org), which is the leading free alternative to Microsoft's Windows servers. SerNet holds rights to the brand SAMBA for Germany since 1999.

Deutsche Telekom assured SerNet in a legally binding document to no longer use the name SAMBA for their products. To rename the software a period of six months was granted. Dr. Johannes Loxen, CEO of SerNet GmbH: "The fact that the history of SAMBA slipped the attention of the Deutsche Telekom AG, has surprised us. Especially since the company is otherwise very concerned about the compliance of trademark rights." He is pleased with the quick and uncomplicated agreement that both parties could achieve. "This time the right of 'Intellectual Property' was on the side of an open source project." SerNet will continue to actively defend the rights to SAMBA in order to avoid confusion with other software projects and to document that open source software is included by industrial property rights in the same way as software with secret source code.

For further information, please contact the SerNet GmbH. You can reach us via presse@sernet.de or call 0551 37 0000 0.