Brian Prince

A breakthrough by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University showed recently that our Social Security numbers may not be as secure as we would like to believe. To hear the Social Security Administration (SSA) tell it, the public should not be concerned because, as a spokesperson told The New York Times, there’s still “no foolproof method […]

It’s no secret that the growth of Twitter and other social media sites has made URL shortening services a welcomed fact of life for many users. Unfortunately, it seems spammers have now taken notice, and are working shortened URLs into their schemes. According to Symantec, there has been a significant increase in the amount of […]

More details are surfacing about a massive denial-of-service attack that has hit both government and commercial Websites in the United States and South Korea in the past few days. According to security researchers, the attacks are the work of malware that infected users and routed traffic to government and commercial sites starting during the July […]

The unpatched vulnerability in the Video ActiveX control that Microsoft has warned about was reported to the company in 2008, but one of the security researchers who found it refused to criticize Microsoft’s response to the threat. The bug was uncovered by researchers Alex Wheeler and Ryan Smith, who at the time both worked at […]

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 […]