Brian Prince

A new report (PDF) from Symantec highlights just how much the spread of attack toolkits has lowered the barrier to entry for cyber-criminals. The kits have become fixtures on the digital shelves of the Internet’s black market, and are now used in the majority of Web attacks. According to the report, the most prevalent toolkits […]

Two men believed to be at the center of the theft of e-mail addresses from AT&T last year are now facing criminal charges. Daniel Spitler, 26, of San Francisco, and 25-year-old Andrew Auernheimer of Fayetteville, Ark., were taken into custody by the FBI Jan. 18 in connection with the theft of more than 100,000 e-mail […]

Facebook’s decision to offer applications access to users’ phone numbers and addresses has put the company in the crosshairs of yet another privacy debate. “We are now making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible as part of the User Graph object,” blogged Jeff Bowen, a member of Facebook’s developer support team. “Because this […]

Security vendors, researchers and the Web’s bad actors all made the news this past week. The week closed with news that David Kernell, the man convicted of breaking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, had been sent to prison instead of a halfway house as a judge had recommended. Kernell […]

Oracle is slated to release 66 security patches in its first update for 2011. The patches stretch across several of the company’s products, including the Oracle Sun product suite and Oracle Fusion Middleware. According to Oracle’s pre-patch advisory, the company’s flagship database software has six fixes headed its way. Two of these bugs can be […]

The man convicted of breaking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account during the 2008 presidential election is now serving his sentence in prison – not a halfway house as a judge recommended. According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, David Kernell, 23, is serving his time at the Ashland Federal Correctional Institution in Kentucky. His projected […]

Adobe Systems has changes in store for its Flash Player as part of an effort to improve user privacy. Those changes will start with new integration between popular Web browsers and Flash Player’s management features for LSOs (local shared objects). “Since local storage allows sites and apps to remember information, there are concerns about the […]

Google plugged 16 security holes in the latest release of Chrome, including one that netted the top prize in Google’s bug rewards program. Of the 16, 13 were classified as “high” security threats, while two others were labeled as “medium.” The remaining bug was classified as “critical”, Google’s highest rating. It was the critical bug, […]

Just as breaking into a bank is pointless without a getaway plan, so too is breaking into a network without the ability to sneak away with data. The exfiltration stage of data theft often garners less attention than the methods used to infect computers, but is no less important. At Black Hat DC, Sean Coyne, […]

Oracle has ended MySQL support for a number of operating system versions that have reached end-of-life or were in low demand. In an announcement, Oracle notified users of the end of support for all MySQL binaries for Microsoft Windows 2000 as of Jan. 6. In addition, as of Jan. 1, Oracle has stopped building MySQL […]

A former contractor working at the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was sentenced to two years in prison for tampering with federal databases after he learned he was being fired. Douglas James Duchak, 47, was sentenced Jan. 11 by U.S. Circuit Court Judge David M. Ebel. He was also ordered to pay more than $60,000 […]

RapidShare has reacted harshly to a report characterizing the file-hosting site as a home for pirated content. In a study released Jan. 11, researchers from MarkMonitor crawled the Web for sites offering counterfeit and pirated digital content tied to 22 high-profile brands. The results included 43 unique Websites classified as digital piracy sites. An additional […]