Brian Prince

The PCI Security Standards Council officially unveiled updated versions of compliance regulations Oct. 28 with minor changes meant to clarify the requirements organizations face. The revisions to the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) and the PCI PA-DSS (Payment Card Industry Payment Application Data Security) are largely language changes and clarifications. The new […]

A critical Mozilla Firefox zero-day has surfaced in the wild. According to security researchers, an attack using the bug was spotted Oct. 26, when the vulnerability was seen being exploited to drop malware on unsuspecting visitors to the Nobel Peace Prize Website. Researchers at Norman ASA reported that the malware tries to connect to two […]

Adobe Systems is planning to patch a critical vulnerability Oct. 28 in response to the appearance of attacks. Adobe originally issued an advisory on the bug Oct. 21. The vulnerability exists in Shockwave Player 11.5.8.612 and earlier, and affects both Windows and Macintosh computers. Attackers can exploit the issue to cause a crash and allow […]

A Mac version of the infamous Koobface worm is making the rounds on social networking sites, according to security researchers. Koobface has a long history on enmity among users of social networking sites, having first appeared in 2008. Traditionally, Koobface targets Windows users on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other popular sites. This time, according to […]

A London software developer has followed in the footsteps of the Firesheep extension for Firefox with his own tool targeting Twitter users leveraging open WiFi. Jonty Wareing’s tool is called “Idiocy,” which he describes in a blog post as “a warning shot to people browsing the internet insecurely.” Unlike Firesheep, which targets a number of […]

A survey from access governance vendor Courion underscored that security cloud has a ways to go. In a survey of 384 business managers (86 percent of which came from companies with at least 1,000 employees), Courion found disagreement over who is in charge of data. More than 65 percent said the cloud service provider, application […]

McAfee: The Most Dangerous Top-Level Internet Domains by Brian Prince .com Takes Command The most heavily trafficked domain in the world went from No. 2 to No. 1 this year, with a weighted risk of 31.3 percent. Slightly more than 6 percent of the 15.5 million, .com sites McAfee analyzed were risky, but when weighted […]

Law enforcement officials in Armenia arrested a man Oct. 26 accused of masterminding a massive botnet operation. According to reports, the 27-year-old suspect was arrested on suspicions of running the Bredolab botnet. Bredolab is a popular Trojan downloader used by cyber-criminals to infect Windows machines via drive-by downloads and spam e-mails. In a takedown operation, […]

The Associated Press experienced a computer outage that spanned several hours Oct. 25 after its systems failed during an attempted security update. According to a report by the AP, the problem arose around 3 p.m. EDT, when the news organization tried to apply a Microsoft patch to update security ahead of next week’s national and […]

From spamming to harvesting data, botnets are a hot commodity for attackers. But as the Iranian Cyber Army’s decision to sell access to its botnet shows, hawking access to compromised computers can be profitable too. The price of a botnet depends on a number of factors. The first is size, noted Imperva Senior Security Strategist […]

A pair of researchers has developed a new Firefox extension that can hijack accounts on Facebook and other Web 2.0 sites to demonstrate the threat posed by a lack of encryption. Software developer Eric Butler and Ian “craSH” Gallagher created a tool they dubbed “Firesheep” to bring the topic of session hijacking front and center. […]

Privacy concerns kept reappearing in the news this week, starting with social networking giant Facebook. Some of the most popular applications on Facebook were observed sharing Facebook user IDs, mostly inadvertently. The information could potentially be used to look up Facebook user names and other public information. Rapleaf, which the Wall Street Journal reported had […]