Brian Prince

Last year, three MIT students got banned from presenting their research on hacking the Boston subway system at DefCon. This year, it is Juniper Networks’ turn to get the boot. Responding to pressure from an ATM vendor, Juniper has agreed to pull a talk originally scheduled for both the Black Hat and DefCon security conferences […]

A blind Boston-area hacker was hit with more than 11 years in prison June 26 for his role in hacking into a telephone network and threatening the Verizon investigator building a case against him. Matthew Weigman, 19, also known as “Little Hacker,” was accused of being part of a gang of telephone hackers that made […]

Notorious hacker Max Ray Butler, also known as Max Ray Vision, pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges June 29, acknowledging his involvement in the theft of credit card and identity data. Butler, 36, of San Francisco, was a former security consultant turned hacker who had been on the radar of law enforcement under his various […]

Mozilla has responded to enhanced privacy settings in rival browsers from Microsoft, Apple and Google with new privacy features of its own. In Firefox 3.5, released June 30, Mozilla has added its own version of private browsing to match a feature offered by Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 and Safari. But Mozilla took the additional […]

Security researchers have uncovered a cache of stolen FTP credentials belonging to a variety of corporations, including Symantec, McAfee, Amazon and the Bank of America. According to security vendor Prevx, a Trojan has swiped some 88,000 FTP credentials as of this morning. The FTP logins were discovered while the company’s researchers were investigating what Prevx […]

Veracode has expanded its cloud-based SecurityReview service to help businesses improve security for mobile applications. The service, which analyzes application code for vulnerabilities, is now available for Windows Mobile applications. Support for BlackBerry and Google Android is expected to come later this year. The new focus comes as the number of mobile applications in the […]

One of the first things I did when I heard pop singer Michael Jackson passed away yesterday—besides decide which of his music videos I would link to on my Facebook page—was brace myself for reports of spam and malware attacks taking advantage of reports of his death. Maybe that’s a sign I’ve been doing this […]

There has been plenty of talk in the past year or so among anti-virus vendors about the usefulness of application whitelisting. But when it comes to the question as to whether or not the technology can replace anti-virus, the subject gets a bit stickier. Whitelisting allows a list of approved files to be used on […]

Facebook is testing out granular privacy controls for its users that will allow them to exercise more control over who sees published content. Just recently, Facebook made a beta version of its publisher available to some of its users that allows them to configure the settings for who can view their information. The new capabilities […]

An IBM researcher has uncovered a way to analyze data while it is still encrypted, in what could be a boon for both spam-filtering applications and cloud computing environments. The challenge of manipulating data without exposing it has bugged cryptographers for decades. But in a breakthrough, IBM researcher and Stanford University Ph.D. candidate Craig Gentry […]

Why hit one OS with malware when you can hit two? That is the question. The situation is this: The Twitter account of well-known venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki was hacked and used to send out tweets luring users to a site hosting malware. According to Trend Micro, the malware changes the DNS settings of Windows […]

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has ordered the creation of a Cyber Command to help secure the U.S. military’s computer networks, according to reports. In a memo, Gates said he will recommend President Barack Obama put the director of the National Security Agency in charge of the command. The command will be established as […]