Brian Prince

Twitter’s servers were hit Aug. 11 with another distributed denial-of-service attack, sending the microblogging service crashing down. Around 3 p.m. EDT, Twitter posted an updated to its status blog stating that it was experiencing a site outage and was examining the nature of the attack. Later, Alex Payne, platform lead at Twitter, posted on a […]

Microsoft released nine security bulletins Aug. 11 for Patch Tuesday, swatting a number of critical bugs. All told, the bulletins address 19 vulnerabilities across Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Visual Studio and other products. Among the vulnerabilities is a bug in Microsoft Office Web Components that has been exploited in the wild. According to Microsoft, the […]

Nine Security Acquisitions We Would Love to See Sophos thus far has not made any real move into SAAS (software as a service), bucking a trend of moves by McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro. The strategy has paid off for Sophos, as the company’s on-premises business is going well. Still, as SAAS adoption continues to […]

Data leakage comes in all shapes and sizes. Just ask officials at Proofpoint. In the company’s sixth annual study (registration required) of outbound e-mail and data loss prevention issues, Proofpoint found that enterprises are increasingly faced with leaks due to the use of social networks and Web 2.0 technology. And they are not taking it […]

Afilias and Neustar are teaming with the Internet Systems Consortium to push support for the consortium’s DNSSEC Look-aside Validation registry. The consortium, commonly called ISC, created DLV to help domain holders secure their domain information. An extension to the DNSSECbis protocol, DLV is designed to aid early DNSSEC adoption by simplifying the configuration of recursive […]

Earlier this year, the SANS Institute teamed with a number of different vendors and organizations to list the 25 most dangerous programming errors. This time, it’s Fortify Software’s turn. But rather than focus on programming errors generally, the company examined several popular PHP projects – such as TikiWiki and phpMyAdmin – and compiled a list […]

The fallout from the distributed denial-of-service attack that hit several Web 2.0 sites Aug. 6 has taken a couple of twists and turns. Besides knocking out Twitter for a time on the Aug. 6, the attack triggered a response from the company that a day later disrupted service for some users. According to Twitter, its […]

Twitter is in the midst of defending itself against an ongoing denial-of-service attack, the micro-blogging service reported this morning. Few details have been released so far about the attack. The company, however, confirmed the attack today in a blog post, and noted that even though the site is back up, officials are still working to […]

Apple has pushed out an upgrade for Mac OS X that plugs 18 security holes, among them a series of critical bugs tied to the handling of various image formats. The update, which brings the OS to version 10.5.8, fixes a number of issues related to ImageIO’s handling of OpenEXR images, EXIF metadata and PNGimages. […]

Microsoft has nine security bulletins planned for the Aug. 11 Patch Tuesday release, including one addressing a critical vulnerability Microsoft warned was under attack. Tucked in among the five critical bulletins Microsoft will release is a patch for a vulnerability in Microsoft Office Web Components the company said in July could be exploited to take […]

Researchers have uncovered numerous vulnerabilities in popular XML libraries from Sun Microsystems, Python and the Apache Software Foundation. The bugs were discovered by researchers at code testing firm Codenomicon in early 2009 while the company was developing a new product for testing XML. When testing XML libraries, evidence of multiple flaws in the parsing of […]

A report released Aug. 4 found that nearly 90 percent of Microsoft Bing’s sponsored search results for prescription drugs and pharmacies lead to rogue operations. The report, (PDF) authored by anti-spam outfit KnujOn and online pharmacy locator LegitScript, found that 89.7 percent of the pharmacies paying for ads on Microsoft’s search engine are engaged in […]