Brian Prince

Microsoft has made the community technology preview of “Project Madison”, the culmination of the company’s DATAllegro acquisition last year. Madison is Microsoft’s answer to calls for a massively scalable data warehousing solution. The appliance partitions large tables across multiple physical nodes, each with dedicated CPU, memory and storage and running its own instance of SQL […]

IBM X-Force released its 2009 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report Aug. 26 with a mix of good news and bad news. The good news is the number of vulnerabilities is declining. There were 3,240 new vulnerabilities discovered in the first half of 2009, an 8 percent decrease over the same period last year. The bad […]

It appears Apple has bolstered Snow Leopard with some new spots to enhance security. In this case, Apple has apparently added a new malware scanner to analyze downloads for malicious content. Apple did not return a request for comment on the feature, which has understandably caught the attention of security companies. “We’re naturally curious about […]

A software developer is claiming Twitter’s fix for a critical cross-site scripting bug is no good, meaning users are still vulnerable to an attack that could allow an attacker to take over their accounts. The bug was first reported by techie James Slater. According to Slater, the vulnerability allows malicious JavaScript to be inserted into […]

As The Pirate Bay fights to stay online, one of its chief rivals has also fallen into the sights of the authorities. A civil court ordered Dutch Website Mininova to remove all files on its servers that point to copyrighted works within three months or face fines. Mininova rivals The Pirate Bay as an Internet […]

A group of researchers uncovered new attacks on AES-256 encryption not too long ago. But while the research is definitely an improvement over the attacks of the past, experts say that is no reason to toss out the algorithm just yet. The research was performed by Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Dmitry Khovratovich and […]

Trying to find actress Jessica Biel can be dangerous-on the Internet, anyway. For the third year in a row, McAfee has put out a list of the most dangerous celebrities when it comes to Internet search results. The list is home to more than a few well-known singers and movie stars, such as Miley Cyrus […]

Researchers at AirMagnet have uncovered a serious flaw in a provisioning system used by Cisco Systems WLANs that could enable attackers to gain access to WLAN-attached systems. According to AirMagnet’s Intrusion Research Team, the vulnerability, announced Aug. 25, lies in Cisco’s OTAP (Over-the-Air-Provisioning) feature, which helps users deploy WAPs (wireless access points). OTAP allows access […]

First Look at Microsoft’s SQL Azure Database CTP by Brian Prince SQL Azure in the Cloud Microsoft recently made the first community technology preview of SQL Azure Database, a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server technologies, generally available last week. Migrating Databases to SQL Azure This image shows a user migrating a database […]

Security firm ScanSafe has uncovered a campaign that has compromised more than 57,000 Websites in a bid to dump gallons of malware on users’ computers. According to ScanSafe, the sites are being infected with a malicious iFrame via SQL injection. The iFrame in turn loads what ScanSafe Senior Security Researcher Mary Landesman described as a […]