Brian Prince

As the Conficker worm continues to dominate headlines, users should keep some things in mind. Despite the talk of a doomsday, there are a number of Conficker mitigations and tools to help home users and enterprises fight Conficker. The major security vendors have all made detection and removal tools available, and recent research has improved […]

Spammers are officially back in full force five months after the shutdown of Web hosting company McColo. According to Google, spammers have fully recovered from the death of the notorious Web hosting firm. By the second half of this March, the seven-day spam volume was the same as before McColo shutdown. Symantec’s MessageLabs said spammers […]

Security pros have uncovered a new technique for detecting PCs infected by the Conficker worm. The technique is based on a discovery by members of the Honeynet Project, which found that Conficker’s attempts to cloak itself from network administrators may have backfired. As part of its defenses, Conficker deploys a fake patch for the Microsoft […]

Oracle has enhanced integration between Database Vault and Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5, one of several moves the company has made to improve database administration in the latest version of Enterprise Manager. When the company announced the latest version of Enterprise Manager earlier this month, it included a number of enhancements designed to improve database […]

With all the buzz over the Conficker worm, it remains an open question at this point just how many enterprises will actually be affected. Between the presence of tools to remove the Conficker infection, a patch for the Windows vulnerability it exploits and general awareness, it seems enterprises should have a good handle on the […]

Law enforcement is still investigating how credit card information belonging to a handful of Symantec customers from the United Kingdom fell into the hands of an identity theft ring. Though speculation has focused on an employee of e4e, a call center in India, a spokesman for Symantec said its own investigation has reached no definitive […]

Google is downplaying potential privacy issues in Google Docs that were recently brought to light. In his blog March 26, Security consultant Ade Barkah published information about three privacy issues in Google Docs tied to the system’s content sharing controls. The most serious of the issues is not described in detail, although he contends that […]

UPDATE: Mozilla has already created a patch for the zero-day vulnerability in its Firefox Web browser uncovered by security researcher Guido Landi-but users will have to wait a while to get it. Attack code for the Firefox flaw was published March 25 on numerous security sites. The code takes advantage of an XSL (Extensible Stylesheet […]

Many enterprises are in the dark when it comes to managing external users of Microsoft SharePoint. Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald estimates as many as 30 percent of SharePoint servers are deployed outside of the management of the IT department, an estimate underscored by a survey of 269 IT managers by Osterman Research that found 31 […]

Much has been written about the Conficker worm’s next big day. On April 1, the worm is expected to evolve yet again, when it blasts out requests to 500 of the 50,000 domains it generates daily in search of an update. Just what that update will do isn’t known; what is known is that Conficker […]