Brian Prince

Microsoft released six security bulletins for Patch Tuesday on July 14, including fixes for vulnerabilities affecting DirectShow and the Video ActiveX Control that have been targeted by attackers. The bulletins address a total of nine vulnerabilities. Three of the bulletins-the ones affecting DirectShow and the Video ActiveX Control and a third addressing issues in the […]

Microsoft officials provided a sneak peak at the road map and pricing information for SQL Azure Database at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference July 14 as they talked up their overall plans for the Windows Azure platform. Microsoft SQL Azure and SQL Azure Database-formerly known as SQL Services and SQL Data Services, respectively-represent Microsoft’s attempt to […]

Trend Micro is pushing ahead with plans to bolster its virtualization security portfolio with a new offering designed to protect VMware ESX/ESXi environments. Dubbed Trend Micro Core Protection for Virtual Machines, the product is slated to be available in August. Designed to protect both active and dormant VMware virtual machines, the product “leverages the VMsafe […]

On the eve of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft is warning users about a flaw in Microsoft Office Web Components that is under attack. Microsoft Office Web Components are a collection of Component Object Model (COM) controls for publishing and viewing charts, spreadsheets and databases on the Web. In this case, the vulnerability lies in the Spreadsheet […]

Two researchers have discovered a design flaw in Web browsers that can be exploited to launch man-in-the-middle attacks on extended validation SSL certificates. Mike Zusman, principal consultant at Intrepidus Group, and independent security researcher Alex Sotirov plan to reveal the details of their findings at the Black Hat security conference coming up in Las Vegas […]

Twitter has suspended the accounts of users infected with the notorious Koobface worm that made its name targeting social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Koobface spreads by posting messages on the victim’s Twitter account with a link that leads to a malicious site that will infect those who visit it with the malware. […]

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo threw a legal right hook at social networking site Tagged.com July 9, charging the site with spamming and stealing the identities of 60 million of its users. Cuomo served the site with a notice of intent, marking his plan to sue Tagged.com for allegedly raiding users’ contact lists and […]

Another round of cyber-attacks hit South Korean Websites Thursday as the spate of denial-of-service attacks continued. The latest attacks affected service on both government and commercial Websites in South Korea. According to the Associated Press, an official from the state-run Korea Communications Commission said that the impact of the attacks is relatively minor, and all […]

Microsoft plans to swat two Windows bugs that have come under attack by hackers as part of the July 14 Patch Tuesday. Among the collection of patches are fixes for the DirectX vulnerability that Microsoft first warned users about at the end of May. But also slated to be fixed is a vulnerability in the […]

IBM researchers have developed new data masking technology they say mixes screen scraping and optical character recognition to conceal confidential data. The platform-agnostic software, codenamed MAGEN (Masking Gateway for Enterprises) works by treating information on the screen as a picture and relying on optical character-recognition technology to determine which onscreen fields need to be blanked […]