Brian Prince

Officials at Microsoft confirmed that thousands users of Windows Live Hotmail had their user credentials posted on a third-party site. According to Microsoft, the username and password information was likely swiped in a phishing scheme, and the company is currently working with customers who were affected. The situation appears to have been first reported by […]

Research In Motion has plugged a security hole that left BlackBerry users open to phishing attacks. The bug lies in the BlackBerry browser dialog box, which provides information about Website domain names and their associated certificates. While the dialog box informs users when there is a mismatch between site domain names and domain names indicated […]

Researchers at AVG Technologies may have uncovered a scheme by attackers to circumvent the CAPTCHA protections on Facebook to create fraudulent accounts. According to Roger Thompson, chief of research at AVG, the firm discovered a number of Facebook pages whose creation appears to have been automated by attackers. The bogus pages were being used to […]

The Department of Homeland Security has gotten the OK to hire as many as 1,000 new IT pros during the next three years to bolster cyber-security. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano made the announcement Oct. 1 during remarks tied to the start of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The new hiring authority is the result of a […]

Federal authorities have extradited two Romanian men to the United States to face charges of operating a phishing scheme targeting customers of several financial institutions. Officials at the FBI announced Sept. 29 that Petru Bogdan Belbita, 25, of Craiova, Romania, and Cornel Ionut Tonita, 28, of Galati, Romania, have been brought to the United States […]

McAfee is working on advancements to its enterprise firewall appliances to add a new level of application and policy controls. The enhancements will be around improving visibility, recognition and policy enforcement of over Web 2.0 applications invisible to conventional firewall technology, McAfee officials said. Leveraging McAfee’s user-based activity monitoring and visualization capabilities, the new solution […]

Oracle Database Administrators, Developers See Salaries Rise Despite Recession by Brian Prince Annual Base Salary for Oracle Pros While the largest percentage of Oracle technology pros is in the $80,001 to $100,000 range, 33 percent of the respondents are making more than $100,000. That represents a slight increase from 2008. The average salary is $95,900. […]

A federal judge has tossed out a $388 million damage award against Microsoft in a patent case that pitted the software giant against a security company called Uniloc. The judge vacated the jury’s verdict Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island, marking another twist in a case that has gone on for six […]

Researchers at Finjan are shining a light on a sneaky banking Trojan behind the theft of roughly $439,000 (300,000 euros) from German bank accounts over a 22-day period. Dubbed URLZone, the Trojan served as a digital lock pick for a sophisticated cyber-gang Finjan tracked from Aug. 11 to Sept. 1. Unlike many typical banking Trojans, […]

Companies thinking about outsourcing IT jobs may want to take a close look at how that will impact security. That is the message of a new report commissioned by VanDyke Software and carried out by Amplitude Research. In their annual survey of network administrators and IT professionals, researchers discovered that organizations that outsourced tech jobs […]

While massive botnets such as Rustock and Conficker often make headlines, research from Damballa released in September shows many enterprises are under attack by smaller threats they’ve likely never heard of. After tracking more than 600 botnets over a three-month period, researchers Gunter Ollmann and Erik Wu discovered that most were composed of 100 nodes […]

Database virtualization vendor Xkoto has its eye on enhancing cloud computing and cluster management for Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2. The company released GridScale 5.1, the latest version of its software, Sept. 29 with a new cluster management system to improve the performance of transaction processing applications. For organizations pursuing cloud computing, Xkoto took […]