Brian Prince

AT&T said the company was hit with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) Aug. 15 that disrupted Internet service for some of its customers. The attack, which reportedly lasted several hours, affected domain name system servers belonging to the company. “Due to a distributed denial of service attack attempting to flood our Domain Name […]

The British government has refused to allow WikiLeaks head Julian Assange to leave the country for Ecuador despite the Ecuadorian government granting him asylum. Since June, Assange has been laying low at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been avoiding extradition on charges of sexual assault brought by two women in Sweden. British […]

A security vendor has disclosed vulnerabilities in a family of toolkits used for distributed denial-of-service attacks to help those looking for ways to “neutralize” attacks. Prolexic Technologies, which has a long history in battling DDoS attacks, revealed weaknesses in the command and control (C&C) architecture for the Dirt Jumper toolkit family. According to the company, […]

A strong internal audit can be the difference between catching a security failure and spending weeks and months doing a forensic investigation of a breach. With this in mind, professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released a whitepaper outlining how internal audits have become a key pillar of security strategies in the age of data breaches […]

Researchers at Trusteer recently uncovered a variant of the Citadel Trojan targeting the virtual private network (VPN) credentials used by employees at a major airport. The firm would not disclose the name of the airport because the situation is being investigated by law enforcement. However, the airport is an international hub that services more than […]

Oracle has issued a fix for a security weakness in its database product that was disclosed at the Black Hat security conference in July in Las Vegas. At the conference, Oracle database security guru David Litchfield of Accuvant Labs outlined CVE-2012-3132, a vulnerability in the Oracle database server. The issue was one of multiple attacks […]

Video game maker Blizzard Entertainment revealed Aug. 9 its security team had discovered an “unauthorized and illegal access” to its internal network Aug. 4. So far, there is no indication that financial information such as credit card numbers or customers’ real names were compromised. According to the company, the intruder was able to get access […]

Microsoft and Adobe Systems are planning to release security updates Aug. 14 to patch security holes in many of their enterprise applications. Adobe released few details about the updates. According to the company, the updates will be for Adobe Reader and Acrobat X (10.1.3) and earlier 10.x versions for Windows and Macs. Adobe Reader and […]

A cyber-espionage tool security pros say is linked to Flame has been spotted stealing banking information in a spate of attacks in the Middle East. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab said the malware, known as Gauss, was launched back in August or September of 2011–roughly the same time as the Duqu malware was discovered. In the […]

Apple and Amazon are taking steps to change some of their security policies after it came to light that hackers tricked staff members into helping them change the passwords of Gizmodo journalist Mat Honan’s online accounts. In a first-person article published on Wired, Honan details how a hacker was able to access his iCloud account […]

A few weeks ago at the Aspen Security Forum, Gen. Keith Alexander, National Security Agency director, said the number of attacks against America’s critical infrastructure increased seventeenfold between 2009 and 2011. Now as much as ever, some argue, a gap exists between the protection capabilities of today’s enterprises and the penetration capabilities of modern attackers. […]

The White House is considering its options after the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 died in the U.S. Senate Aug. 2, including possibly using an executive order to mandate parts of the bill if Congress refuses to vote on it, according to a report. According to The Hill, White House press secretary Jay Carney said President […]