Brian Prince

Researchers at Symantec say they have made a breakthrough in deciphering another piece of Stuxnet’s puzzle – the disruption of motors at nuclear power plants. Stuxnet – which is considered by some to be one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever seen – was first uncovered by the security community this summer. In […]

On Nov. 11 IBM announced it had closed on its $1.7 billion acquisition of data warehousing vendor Netezza, making good on an announcement it made in late September. At the time of the September announcement, IBM said the acquisition was driven largely by a desire to bring Netezza’s analytic capabilities in-house. With the deal now […]

From Microsoft and Apple security updates to the sentencing of the man who hacked former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mail, there was no shortage of news this past week in security. In a relatively small Patch Tuesday update, Microsoft released three security bulletins to cover 11 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway and […]

A new report has pulled the veil away from the Koobface botnet, exposing how the operation made more than $2 million between June 2009 and June 2010. The money-making schemes of the Koobface gang were revealed in a sweeping paper (PDF) released by Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), a joint venture backed by researchers from the […]

Adobe Systems plans to release an out-of-bad security update next week to patch security vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Among the fixes is a patch for an Adobe Flash Player flaw that impacts a component of Adobe Reader and Acrobat and has been the subject of attacks. According to Adobe, the issue – which […]

More than one million mobile phone users in China have been infected with malware due to a fake antivirus scam. According to media reports, malicious code hidden within a fake antivirus application is infecting phones and causing them to blast out spam messages that have cost users about two million yuan ($300,000 US) a day. […]

Microsoft has unveiled more details of project “Atlanta”, a cloud-based configuration assessment service aimed at Microsoft SQL Server deployments. The company released a beta version of the service this week during the PASS Summit 2010 conference in Seattle. It was just one of several announcements the company made during the four-day event, where Microsoft released […]

The man convicted of breaking into former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s person e-mail account was sentenced Nov. 12 to serve a year and a day in either a federal prison or a halfway house. Twenty-three-year-old David Kernell, son of Tennessee state representative and Democrat Mike Kernell, was convicted of hacking into Palin’s Yahoo account in […]

A look back at 2010 by researchers at Websense revealed that a mix of better tactics and black hat search engine optimization (SEO) laid the foundation for a dramatic jump in malicious sites for the year. In the “Websense 2010 Threat Report,” researchers had mostly bad news for users-the number of malicious sites increased 111.4 […]

A massive security update from Apple plugged more than 130 Mac OS X security holes but left users of PGP’s whole disk encryption product locked out of their systems. Wednesday, customers of PGP, now a division at Symantec, reported being unable to boot their computers after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.5. Later that day, […]

It’s been a busy week for Microsoft’s SQL Server Team. Microsoft released the first community technology preview (CTP) for the next-generation version of SQL Server, codenamed Denali, Nov. 9. But that is just one of several announcements to come out of the PASS Summit 2010 conference in Seattle this week. In addition to unveiling Denali, […]

AVG Technologies has agreed to acquire DroidSecurity to bring its mobile security capabilities in-house. DroidSecurity is focused on protecting smartphones, tablets and other devices running on Google Android from malware. The acquisition enables AVG’s Mobile Solutions Team to extend its security offerings for its more than 110 million consumers and small businesses in 170 countries. […]