Brian Prince

Microsoft plans to release an out-of-band patch to plug the zero-day security hole exploited recently in attacks on Google and other companies. George Stathakopoulos, general manager of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Security group, announced that Microsoft would offer a timeline for the patch Jan. 20. The company’s move follows news that France and Germany are encouraging […]

Embedded database vendor McObject is making a play to appeal to Java developers with the creation of a new interface for its ExtremeDB product. With its JNI (Java Native Interface) for ExtremeDB, announced Jan. 18, McObject is looking to deliver an in-memory database for the Java community capable of running at the speed of compiled […]

An association of journalists based in Beijing said reporters have recently had their Google Gmail accounts hijacked. In a statement, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) stopped short of accusing the Chinese government or any other entity of taking part in the hijacking, but warned members to be mindful of security. “Foreign correspondents in […]

France and Germany have advised their citizens to ditch Internet Explorer in the wake of reports that an IE zero-day bug was involved in the massive cyber-attack against Google and other companies. Officials in both countries issued warnings in the past few days telling users to consider switching from Internet Explorer to other Web browsers […]

Google has fixed a cross-site scripting vulnerability in Google Orkut a security researcher said could be used to steal cookies and other information. Nir Goldshlager, who also recently uncovered vulnerabilities affecting Google Calendar and Twitter, told eWEEK the problem was due to an input validation error. “An attacker will exploit the vulnerability if a user […]

Attack code targeting the Internet Explorer vulnerability used to hit Google and other companies has hit the Web. According to McAfee, researchers have seen references to the code-which exploits an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer-on mailing lists and have confirmed that the code was published on at least one Website. The code was used […]

Six Strategies Database Administrators Need to Know for 2010 by Brian Prince Right Database for the Right Application Enterprises should disregard the idea of general-purpose RDBMS (relational DBMS) to solve their data management problems.”This is most obviously happening in the data warehousing space where a variety of analytical database startups are challenging Oracle, IBM and […]

The United States plans to ask China for an explanation regarding the cyber-attacks that recently hit Google, Adobe Systems and dozens of other companies. In remarks Jan. 15 to the press, State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley said the United States will be issuing a formal demarche to the Chinese Government on this issue in the […]

The British High Court has given the thumbs up to a judicial review of the Home Secretary’s decision to allow the extradition process for hacker Gary McKinnon to move forward. The court’s decision is yet another twist in the roughly eight-year effort to bring McKinnon back to the United States to face charges that he […]

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has finished work on a fix to a vulnerability in the Secure Sockets Layer protocol security researchers uncovered last August. The vulnerability partially invalidates the SSL lock and allows attackers to compromise sites that use SSL for security-including banking sites and back-office systems that use Web services-based protocols. The […]