Brian Prince

Symantec announced Dec. 18 the company won a victory in the battle against piracy when a court awarded it $12 million in damages against a distributor selling counterfeit Symantec software throughout North America. The verdict was handed down by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles. The court ruled […]

SQL injection attacks aren’t going away; in fact, they remain one of the top threats on the Web. Locking the doors to the database is a key part of enterprise security, and it’s also where database security vendor Secerno is hoping its approach will separate it from the competition. Secerno is far from being alone […]

When reports surfaced this month that a new variant of the Koobface worm was slithering its way across Facebook, it became another entry into the book of malware targeting social networking sites. Security vendors expect more of the same in 2009, with attackers adding a touch of social engineering to infect users of sites such […]

Microsoft released a patch Dec. 17 for a zero-day vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer that has been making headlines recently. The vulnerability, which affects every version from IE 5 to IE 8 Beta 2, lies in the browser’s data binding function. According to Microsoft, when data binding is enabled-which it is by default-it is possible under […]

From a business perspective, nothing shook up the security market during 2008 like Microsoft’s decision to kill Windows Live OneCare. When the company announced in November that it would phase out OneCare in June 2009, observers were quick to call Microsoft’s roughly two-year experiment in the consumer security space a failure. Microsoft, of course, sees […]

Microsoft will release a patch tomorrow, Dec. 17, for a zero-day vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer that has been under attack by hackers. The vulnerability, which affects all supported versions of IE, lies in the browser’s data binding function. According to Microsoft, when data binding is enabled-which it is by default-it is possible under certain conditions […]

Hackers have begun compromising Web sites to infect vulnerable computers with malware that exploits a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer revealed last week. Microsoft reported a significant increase in the number of infected users over the weekend, and researchers at Trend Micro estimated about 6,000 sites had been infected. The move is a shift in […]

A test by IT consulting company Chapin Information Services has turned attention toward what is perhaps an undervalued element of browser security-password management. The company took a look at all the major browsers: Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.62, Firefox 3.04, Safari 3.2 and Google Chrome. According to the study, each browser was susceptible to a […]

Microsoft has issued an advisory to help users deal with a zero-day flaw affecting Internet Explorer. In an update, Microsoft stated the flaw affects not only Internet Explorer (IE) 7 as originally thought, but also versions 5 and 6. However, as of Dec. 11, Microsoft had only seen attacks against IE 7. While the flaw […]

The Google Chrome browser is no longer a beta, and has been outfitted with a coat of security armor Google hopes will both protect users and help Chrome compete with rival browsers. The toughest piece of that armor involves sandboxing. In Chrome, HTML rendering and JavaScript execution are isolated in their own class of processes. […]

A day after December’s Patch Tuesday release Dec. 9, Microsoft found itself investigating reports of a zero-day bug affecting Internet Explorer 7 as well as attacks against an unpatched flaw in the WordPad Text Converter. According to Vupen Security, exploit code for the IE flaw takes advantage of an issue with the parsing of malformed […]

For those of us watching the database space, 2008 can be remembered as the year when cloud computing began to touch the database market in a major way. The biggest example was the launch of Microsoft SDS (SQL Data Services) in March. The move made Microsoft the first major database vendor to offer a version […]