Brian Prince

A pair of researchers from the Indiana University uncovered a vulnerability in Facebook that allowed attackers to get their hands on user data. Students Rui Wang and Zhou Li found a flaw in the Facebook platform code that enables a malicious site to impersonate other Websites and obtain the same access permissions those sites receive. […]

Spammers have control of thousands of IP addresses assigned to the wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the science center that bears her name. According to the Spamhaus Project, spammers hijacked IP addresses assigned to Suzanne Mubarak and the Suzanne Mubarak Science Exploration Center. The move is typical of spammers trying to get their […]

Last year, Microsoft made a splash when it led a legal charge against Waledac’s operators and gained control of 276 domains belonging to the botnet. But Waledac does not die easily, something underscored recently by researchers at The Last Line of Defense, which uncovered a trove of nearly 124,000 FTP credentials stolen by the botnet. […]

Federal authorities unsealed an indictment Feb. 1 in Detroit accusing stock broker Gregg M. Berger of New York of running a multimillion-dollar “pump-and-dump” scam for more than two years. The superseding indictment accuses Berger, 47, of conspiring with Alan Ralsky, Francis Tribble, How Wai John Hui, Scott Bradley and others to carry out the scheme […]

Between the attacks by “Anonymous” and censorship efforts by various governments, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were a familiar feature of news stories in 2010. But while the sophistication of attacks may have grown during the past year, efforts by Internet service providers have not kept pace, according to research by Arbor Networks. In a 12-month […]

EMC released a free version of its data warehousing technology Feb. 1 with an eye toward developers and big data analytics. The release of the Community Edition of the EMC Greenplum Database joins the Greenplum Data Computing Appliance in the tree of fruits from the company’s acquisition of Greenplum last July. The freeware, which mixes […]

Mozilla has added the Do Not Track HTTP header discussed last week to the pre-beta build of the upcoming version of Firefox. The HTTP header is Mozilla’s answer to consumer concerns about online behavioral tracking by advertisers. “If you’d like to try out the feature, grab a nightly build; I must warn you though, these […]

Oracle is pitching new integration in its update to Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler as an answer to the collaboration needs of development teams. In version 3.0, Oracle has added integration with Subversion, an open-source tool that helps developers track changes to their source code. Generally, users check their code into a central repository to […]

The penalties for being out of step with compliance mandates are not going away, and neither is the cost of keeping up with regulations. However, a new report from the Ponemon Institute revealed that more compliance audits can actually have the effect of lowering the price tag. According to the study (PDF), which included responses […]

User privacy was in the news this past week when Mozilla and Google proposed their own answers for concerns about online behavioral tracking by advertisers. Mozilla entered the fray Jan. 23 when it proposed adding a “Do Not Track” HTTP header to the Firefox browser to send a signal to Websites that users do not […]

Microsoft issued an advisory on a Windows security vulnerability today after exploit code for the bug went public. The bug, which lies in the MHTML (MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML) protocol handler, can be exploited to cause data leakage. Though proof-of-concept code for the vulnerability has already gone public, the company said it is unaware […]

A security researcher has uncovered a way to exploit a data-leak issue affecting Google Android users. Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, discovered the bug while working on what he described as an Android-related project. The flaw, he wrote in an advisory, impacts Android 2.3 and is of the same nature […]