Brian Prince

VeriSign has named William A. Roper Jr. president and chief executive officer following the resignation of former CEO Stratton D. Sclavos. “VeriSign is a highly respected company with an attractive business model and leading positions in growing markets,” Roper said in a statement. “I look forward to working with VeriSigns management team to capitalize on […]

Security researchers at San Diego-based Akonix Systems Inc., a provider of instant messaging security and compliance products, have uncovered 170 IM threats this year—an increase of 73 percent from the same time period in 2006. The companys IM Security Center researchers tracked 20 malicious code attacks over IM networks during the month of May, Akonix […]

Security research firm Immunity released exploit code for a serious bug affecting Mac OS X less than 24 hours after Apple released a patch for it. The flaw is a buffer overflow vulnerability in the UPnP Internet Gateway Device Standardized Device Control code used to create port mappings on home NAT (Network Address Translation) gateways […]

The Better Business Bureau has issued a fraud alert regarding the resurgence of a spam attack that targets high-level executives in various industries. The spam e-mails purport to be sent by the BBB in an effort to entice users to click on a malicious link. The SANS Institute reported a similar wave of targeted spam […]

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board voted May 24 to approve Auditing Standard No. 5, complementing new guidelines given the thumbs up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that are aimed at making it easier and less expensive for public companies to comply with the auditing requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. But […]

A new variant of the Russian Trojan Gozi is circulating on the Web, this time armed with a keylogging function and the ability to scramble itself so it is difficult to detect by anti-virus software. The Trojan is believed to have been spreading since April 17. Like the original, which was discovered earlier in 2007, […]

Security vendor nCircle announced May 23 that it has completed the acquisition of Cambia Security, a company specializing in agent-less configuration auditing. Cambia makes Cambia CM, a tool that analyzes system configurations to ensure the configurations are in line with company policy and any applicable government regulations. According to officials at San Francisco-based nCircle, the […]

The recent news that a tool from SlySoft can bypass the newest Advanced Access Content System encryption scheme is the latest assault on digital rights management-and some are taking it as proof that the technology needs to change or wither away. “I dont think it has been easy, but nevertheless [the AACS] is being broken […]

Microsoft officials have released a much-anticipated tool to help protect Office 2003 from malware attacks. MOICE (Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment) has gone live and is available for download. The free tool converts files from Office 2003 to the new Office 2007 Open XML format in a bid to strip out the exploit from the […]

The mammoth database system that would be needed under an immigration bill currently being discussed by Congress has security experts thinking about procedures, privacy and protection. The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (PDF) is a controversial compromise reached by a bipartisan group of senators. The proposed legislation already has many […]

IronPort Systems has revised its Internet traffic monitoring Web site, a resource for IT staffers searching for a real-time view into security threats. This Web site, www.senderbase.org, provides e-mail administrators visibility into the e-mail and Web traffic coming into their networks and features a new graphical user interface company officials hope will make it easier […]

IBM officials hope a new feature aimed at increasing performance and availability of applications using Informix Dynamic Server “Cheetah” in a multi-node, blade server environment will separate the upcoming release from the pack. “Users can deploy a greater number of nodes—beyond only a primary and single secondary,” said Bernie Spang, director of IBM data servers. […]