Brian Prince

McAfee announced July 30 that it has agreed to purchase security vendor MX Logic for $140 million to help build out its software-as-a-service business. MX Logic specializes in cloud-based e-mail and Web security, an area McAfee-as well as its chief rival, Symantec-has shown interest in. Less than two weeks ago, on July 20, McAfee announced […]

As always, the Black Hat security conference has put our collective eyes on the latest research. This time around, attendees walk away from the conference with a fresh set of concerns about everything from the smart grid to the X.509 authentication scheme. The event wraps up today, as its sister conference, DEFCON 17, kicks off […]

Sometimes it’s the little things. According to Microsoft, one of the bugs in the Active Template Library was the result of a typo. An ampersand, to be exact. “The extra ‘&’ character in the vulnerable code causes the code to write potentially untrusted data, of size cbSize, to the address of the pointer to the […]

Symantec saw profits drop year-over-year for the first quarter of fiscal 2010, as the company has found enterprises less willing to sign long-term deals. “On the enterprise side, some customers focused their spending on shorter-term contracts or maintenance renewals, resulting in fewer new license deals, but stronger deferred revenue,” Enrique Salem, CEO of Symantec, said […]

A security researcher has uncovered new details on the malware behind one of the largest ongoing cyber-crime operations on the Internet. Known alternatively as the Clampi, Ligats or Ilomo Trojan, the malware is believed to have been infecting computers since 2007. Today, it is believed to have swiped data from hundreds of thousands of Windows […]

IBM has acquired Ounce Labs to bolster its application testing abilities. The move underscores the demand for vulnerability testing, which analysts say has continued to grow even in the face of an economic downturn. According to Gartner, the market for both dynamic and static testing has grown steadily during the past few years and now […]

A Day in the Life of the Rustock Botnet by Brian Prince Evolution of Rustock This is a picture of the early evolution of the Rustock backdoor Trojan. Totmau is a Trojan Symantec found a few months before Rustock was discovered. Researchers there suspect the malware authors may be the same or connected, but that […]

Will Google Chrome OS Security Be Tough Enough? by Brian Prince Locking Down the OS Given that the focus is on supporting cloud applications, this should come naturally. By turning Google Chrome OS into a “toaster” and running primarily—if not only—Web apps like Google Docs and Picasa, Google can substantially reduce the attack surface, noted […]

Oracle has announced the release of Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database 11g as well as a new database caching option in a nod toward the middle tier. The TimesTen In-Memory Database is a stand-alone in-memory relational database with full persistence and recoverability. With the caching option, Oracle is looking to improve application performance by caching data […]

Microsoft made good on its promise to deliver two out-of-band security bulletins July 28 that cover vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Visual Studio. All told, the bulletins cover six bugs in IE and Visual Studio. MS09-035, the Visual Studio bulletin, provides an updated copy of the ATL (Active Template Library) that swats three bugs in […]

For all that has been written and said about the notorious Conficker worm, much remains unknown to the public. Who was behind it? What was their motive? Unfortunately, those mysteries will not be unraveled this week at the Black Hat security conference, when F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen gives his presentation on the worm. […]

A security researcher who has asserted Apple’s iPhone 3GS is not enterprise-ready has posted tutorials on YouTube to back up his claims. Jonathan Zdziarski, who teaches forensic classes about recovering data from the iPhone, has posted two tutorials to YouTube to demonstrate issues he contends are serious enough to make IT pros leave the iPhone […]