Brian Prince

U.S. President Barack Obama ordered the use of Stuxnet against Iran as part of an effort to disrupt the country’s nuclear ambitions, according to The New York Times. In a story adapted from an upcoming book by New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger, anonymous sources are quoted as saying that Obama accelerated plans […]

The White House has announced a series of initiatives in partnership with government agencies and the private sector to combat botnets. The initiatives, which were announced May 30 at an event at the White House, are the result of a partnership between the Homeland Security and Commerce Department, the White House Cybersecurity Office and a […]

The United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union is issuing a warning for nations to be on guard for the newly identified Flame malware, according to a report. “This is the most serious [cyber] warning we have ever put out,” Marco Obiso, cyber-security coordinator for the U.N.’s Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union, told Reuters. Also known as Skywiper […]

A New Jersey mayor has been arrested along with his son on charges they conspired to hack a Website calling for the mayor’s ouster as part of a campaign to target the mayor’s critics. Felix Roque, mayor of the Hudson County town of West New York, and his son Joseph Roque were arrested Thursday for […]

Two researchers have proposed an extension to TLS, or transport layer security, as a solution to some of the security challenges facing the Secure Sockets Layer certificate ecosystem. Their proposal comes after a troublesome year for certificate authorities (CAs) during which a number of high-profile CA security breaches shook the IT industry€™s confidence in SSL […]

Mobile malware targeting Google Android devices exploded in the first few months of 2012, according to a new report from McAfee. Nearly 7,000 Android threats were identified and collected through the end of the 2012 first quarter, according to McAfee’s threat report. This represents a more than 1,200 percent increase when compared with the 600 […]

Google is warning Web users infected with the DNSChanger malware that if they do not clean their computer before the FBI’s impending deadline, they may lose access to the Internet.Google said it plans to notify as many as 500,000 users that are still infected with the malware, which was used by a cyber-gang hit in […]

Hacktivists associated with the Anonymous movement leaked 1.7GB of data belonging to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics online. The Bureau of Justice Statistics collects and publishes data on crime in the United States, including data on cyber-crimes. In a statement on The Pirate Bay accompanying a torrent file for downloading the data, the […]

Last week, the director of Utah’s Department of Technology Services (DTS) resigned in the wake of a massive data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 800,000 people to hackers believed to have been in Eastern Europe. The breach did not happen due to sophisticated malware, however. Instead, a series of configuration mistakes during […]

A class action lawsuit filed against Facebook in California is seeking a whopping $15 billion in damages for privacy violations tied to the tracking of Web users.The suit, which was filed by law firm Stewarts Law US, combines 21 privacy lawsuits filed against the social network in more than a dozen states into a single […]

A malware campaign targeting Facebook, Google Mail, Hotmail and Yahoo user debit card data has been linked to the infamous Zeus Trojan. Zeus is one of the most prevalent pieces of financial malware on the Web. During the past several years, Zeus variants have been linked to major criminal operations around the globe, including one […]

Google closed 20 security vulnerabilities in the latest edition of its Chrome browser, coupling a bevy of security fixes with a new tab-synchronization feature. In Chrome 19, Google closed eight vulnerabilities ranked “high,” seven ranked “medium” and five classified as “low.” All together, Google handed out $16,500 to researchers for work related to this release. […]