Brian Prince

When it comes to cyber-crime, it’s not always about test driving the newest brand of malware on the road. Sometimes, it’s about Old Betsy, the reliable piece of malware that will get you from point A to point B – the final location being a compromised computer. Research in Fortinet’s June Threat Report underscores this […]

In another example of insider threats, the FBI nabbed a former software designer for Goldman Sachs and is accusing him of downloading proprietary software and sending the data to a Web server in Germany. Sergey Aleynikov, 39, of North Caldwell, N.J., was arrested by agents at Newark Liberty International Airport July 3 and charged with […]

Symantec July 6 pulled the covers off of free beta versions of Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010 with new reputation-based technologies code-named Quorum.’ Quorum will be introduced into the market in fall 2009. Symantec’s 2010 products use application reputation in response to the problem of dealing with online criminals who use unique […]

Microsoft is investigating attacks targeting a vulnerability in Microsoft Video ActiveX Control that could allow a hacker to gain complete control of a system. Not much has been said about the exact nature of the Microsoft Video ActiveX Control vulnerability, which is so far reported to affect Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. If the […]

McAfee has resolved a glitch affecting its security software that crashed computers around the globe last week. On July 3, McAfee users running old versions of the VirusScan engine found themselves facing false positives after downloading a DAT file that labeled legitimate programs as malware. According to McAfee support forums, the glitch led to authorized […]

George Hotz, the 19-year old hacker who made headlines for unlocking Apple’s original iPhone, has now released the first-known jailbreaking tool for iPhone 3GS. The tool, called “purplea1n,” initially was only available for versions of the Windows operating system-excluding Windows 7-but Hotz declared in a blog post that a version for the Mac is now […]

July 4 weekend is usually a time for barbecues, beach parties and Independence Day spam. But the death of pop superstar Michael Jackson may have changed the face of the annual spam barrage. Instead of just the typical deluge of e-mails luring users with tales of fireworks displays, spammers and malware authors are still riding […]

It’s heeeeeerrrrre. The Month of Twitter Bugs kicked off July 1 with news of four cross-site scripting bugs affecting bit.ly, a popular URL shortening service used by Twitter users. The bugs are the first entry in a monthlong effort to expose third-party vulnerabilities that impact Twitter. The brainchild of security researcher Aviv Raff, Month of […]

For anyone who thought the spam slowdown that followed the shutdown of rogue ISP 3FN was still going on, Google has some bad news for you. In its report on spam during the second quarter of 2009, Google found that spam continued to tick upward, experiencing a short-lived but significant drop when 3FN was dismantled. […]

Facebook is simplifying its privacy options as it simultaneously looks to make it easier for members of the social networking site to share content with anyone on the Internet. For starters, the company is consolidating about six privacy pages and roughly 40 settings onto one page. The site will also standardize the options for each […]

The PostgreSQL 8.4 database has hit the streets, bringing with it a host of new features. But perhaps just as important is what is going on behind the scenes. As the open-source database has trucked along, the amount of work required to get the database production-ready has grown. To make sure everything gets done, contributors […]

Oracle has released a new tool designed to help developers more easily design data models for the Oracle database. Dubbed the Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler, the standalone tool supports logical, relational, multidimensional and data type modeling, and with it, users can build and modify data models. “Every successful application starts with a strong data […]