Brian Prince

Google is adding a new alert system to Gmail to warn users if their account may have been compromised. The feature is being rolled out today and is meant to offer users an additional layer of protection for Gmail users via an automated system that flags suspicious activity and generates a red alert. “It will […]

The country’s Internal Revenue Service has some work to do – and not just because it’s tax season. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the IRS has corrected only about a third of the 89 security problems the GAO found in an audit of the agency in fiscal 2008. Among the […]

Mozilla has swatted a critical bug in its Firefox browser ahead of schedule. The flaw, which was discovered by Intevydis founder Evgeny Legerov, had caused enough of a stir to prompt Germany’s B??rgerCERT to advise users to ditch the browser until it was fixed. According to Mozilla, the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) decoder contains […]

Seattle, Boston, DC Top Cyber-crime Hot Spots List by Brian Prince Seattle, Wash. Seattle finished first by a wide margin: It was the only city to score in the top 10 in every category. Nearly 68 percent of Seattle residents are regular Internet users, and almost 29 percent use it at least five times a […]

Recent statistics from the Internet Crime Complaint Center put the amount of losses Americans suffered in 2009 due to online fraud at close to $560 million. But what cities are the most dangerous pound-for-pound? According to an analysis by Symantec and research firm Sperling’s BestPlaces, Seattle ranks as the riskiest online city in America. The […]

Six Easy Steps to Slashing Database Costs by Brian Prince Database Archiving That Defers Hardware Upgrades Between upgrades, migrations and patches, managing a multiterabyte database is costly and effort-intensive. Database archiving, however, moves unused or inactive data from production databases to an archival repository for long-term retention, thereby deferring hardware upgrades by freeing up system […]

Sybase has plans for advanced spatial data functionality in the next release of its SQL Anywhere database. The technology enables the development of spatial applications for smartphones and the synchronization of “on-device spatial data with spatial databases, application servers and enterprise systems.” Sybase is previewing the product at the ESRI Worldwide Business Partner Conference, held […]

The German government has advised users to ditch Mozilla’s Firefox browser until a security vulnerability is fixed. The advisory was issued March 19 by B??rgerCERT , Germany ‘s Computer Emergency Readiness Team, in response to a vulnerability reported by Russian security researcher Evgeny Legerov. Legerov, who is the founder of the Moscow-based security firm Intevydis, […]

Researchers from the University of California-Santa Barbara have created a free spam-filtering service for Twitter that detects malicious accounts and forwards the information to the microblogging service for enforcement. The service, dubbed Spamdetector, is the brainchild of Ph.D. student Gianluca Stringhini. “We started studying social network spam one year ago,” Stringhini said. “With the rise […]

Attackers are spamming out malware hidden within e-mails targeting Facebook issues. The scam starts with an e-mail claiming to contain a password reset feature for Facebook. Instead, users who open the attachment are greeted by Bredolab, a Trojan downloader that installs other types of malware on infected computers. In this case, the first thing the […]