SecurityVibes was born from the merger of two well-known french IT security news websites, Vulnerabilite.com and LesNouvelles.net.

Both were independently created in 2000 and merged in january, 2009. The SecurityVibes project had then just been announced a few month earlier during the october, 2008 edition of Les Assises de la Sécurité, Europe's major IT security convention.

SecurityVibes is sponsored by Philippe Courtot through his company Qualys, Inc.

With Howard Schmidt, another US IT Security guru, Philippe Courtot also sponsors the CSO Interchange, an international gathering and Think Tank of CSOs meeting in San Francisco, Paris, London and Rotterdam.

His support of SecurityVibes is well within the continuity of those precedent initiatives

SecurityVibes has total editorial independence from its sponsor. The subjects of published articles are selected by its editorial team alone, all of which come from the professional IT press both in France and in UK. There is absolutely no intervention from Qualys, Inc during the editorial process. This is worth repeating : there is absolutely no intervention from Qualys, Inc during SecurityVibes' editorial process.

Articles can also be requested by SecurityVibes members, at which time the editorial team investigates on behalf of its members. And of course, members can themselves write articles, that will be published after an editorial review.

In any case, never will Qualys, Inc - as a sponsor - have any editorial edge.

It's SecurityVibes' policy to make no difference between vendors when it comes to editorial : every IT security player may be mentioned in an article, be it a Qualys, Inc competitor or not, or a SecurityVibes advertiser or not. The only relevant criteria is editorial relevance here.

Thanks to its sponsor's ongoing support, SecurityVibes is totally nondependent from advertising revenues. This alone allows for editorial independence. Although there is some regular advertisement on the site, its revenues will not make or break SecurityVibes

SecurityVibes also broaden its revenues sources not to depend solely upon its sponsor. That's why it launched a special side-community dedicated to vendors, called the Vendors Zone. This community allows any IT security vendor an opportunity to expose its expertise to regular SecurityVibes members in a relevant, non-intrusive and privacy-compliant way.

SecurityVibes' regular thematic breakfasts are for example funded through advertising and the Vendors Zone revenues stream

SecurityVibes is first and foremost a private community for IT Security professionals within an organization (CSOs, Risk Managers, IT security engineer, etc). Our goal is to offer our members a discussion space protected from commercial solicitation, including from our sponsor.

We do not want every discussion started on SecurityVibes being seen as a call to vendors or consultants to offer their services.

Our membership charter does detail our current criteria to join SecurityVibes as a member.

Members private informations are not to be shared with any third party, with the exception of delivering a requested service. For example, our third-party emailing partner needs to know members' email addresses in order to send out our daily newsletter. But he his prohibited by contract to use them in any other way.

Advices, opinions and tips shared by members on SecurityVibes are not to be used anywhere else. In addition, access is limited to logged-in members.

SecurityVibes' team works remotely, both in France and in the UK. But we do have access to conference rooms in Qualys offices if needed, for the purpose of business meetings for example.

SecurityVibes postal address is :

SecurityVibes
c/o Qualys France
7, Place de la Défense - Suite C
92400 Courbevoie
France.

SecurityVibes' servers are hosted in the United States by Savvis, a dedicated IT infrastructure provider.

Savvis is not a consumer-oriented hosting company : it is a full IT infrastructures provider for major companies.

SecurityVibes' servers are being hosted in the United States because of the international flavor of its community.

The web application running SecurityVibes is mainly an internal development.

We do bring the utmost attention to security. This includes, but is not limited to, hosting in a private rack with a major IT infrastructures provider and regular automated vulnerabilities assessments. However, 100% security just can't be achieved, and we sure will not pretend that much !

No critical information is being exchanged on SecurityVibes : its members comment public IT security news and offer advices, opinions and tips about the day-to-day burden of a regular CSO.

Nevertheless, every member may, at his own discretion, make any personal information on his profile private. He also may choose to publish any of his contents (questions, answers, comments, etc) using an anonymous profile.

As many (many !) other websites, SecurityVibes relies for its statistics on the very popular Google Analytics, published by Google (see its terms of services).

SecurityVibes also uses a collaborative users feedback solution called User Voice. This allows visitors to suggest improvements and vote on what new functionality should be developed next.

Last, SecurityVibes makes use of the Flexigrid (with Jquery) framework to display tabular data.