Brian Prince

The Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security have agreed to work closer to fight threats to military and civilian computer systems and networks. The new memorandum of agreement was reached to coordinate and improve efforts to secure the country’s cyber-infrastructure, according to the document (PDF). “With this memorandum of agreement, effective immediately, […]

As if being the leading home for botnets wasn’t enough, a new report from Sophos named the United States as the top spam-relaying country for the third quarter of the year. According to Sophos, between July and September, the United States was responsible for relaying 18.6 percent of all spam, up from 15.2 percent during […]

Most botnet-infected computers reside in the United States, according to figures from Microsoft. In Version 9 of its Security Intelligence Report, Microsoft reported finding 2.2 million computers in the United States under the control of botnets during the second quarter of the year. That figure represents roughly a third of all the bots Microsoft detected, […]

IBM has released an updated version of its Informix database with an emphasis on improved performance. In Informix 11.7, IBM is touting a number of performance enhancements. “There are quite a few features that contributed to the performance [improvements]-for warehouse improvement the primary ones were star/snowflake schema optimizations and multi-index scans,” noted Bernie Spang, director […]

McAfee is pushing a new initiative it calls “Security Connected” that puts an emphasis on correlating information from its security products to better protect devices. According to McAfee, the approach is meant to help businesses apply more intelligent and effective security. The enemy of Security Connected is a siloed security strategy found in many businesses […]

Microsoft wasn’t the only company that released a massive update today. Oracle pushed out its final update of the year, complete with 85 security fixes. Oracle initially announced it was fixing 81 vulnerabilities. Of the 85 patches released today, 33 are focused on the Oracle applications suites, with the breakdown as follows: six for Oracle […]

A Pennsylvania school district has agreed to a $610,000 settlement in a controversial legal battle over its use of Webcam technology on school-issued laptops. The Lower Merion School District confessed to taking thousands of Webcam photos and screenshots from school-issued laptops. The district contended the technology was meant to find missing computers. However in February, […]

Facebook has added a one-time password feature as part of an effort to address account security. The social network site is gradually rolling out the ability to have Facebook text a one-time password to users concerned about working on machines other than their normal computers, such as public computers in hotels, cafes or airports. “Simply […]

Ingres has updated its flagship database with new migration, performance and security capabilities in the hopes of winning users over from its competitors. Migration is a key focus of the enhancements in Ingres Database 10, starting with multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) that the company said provides concurrent access to the database. “This feature greatly improves […]

Microsoft released 16 security bulletins today as part of a massive Patch Tuesday update. The record-breaking update includes fixes for 49 security vulnerabilities affecting Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and the .NET Framework. Mixed in with the fixes is a patch for one of the zero-day vulnerabilities used by the Stuxnet worm. According to Symantec’s […]

It was a week that saw Facebook get hit once again with controversy and Microsoft announced plans for a massive security update. On Oct. 6, Facebook announced plans for a new Groups feature to give users more control of who they share information with. The Groups are set to “closed” by default, meaning the names […]

Security information event management vendor NitroSecurity has bought the security business of LogMatrix, bringing new technology into the fold NitroSecurity said will help with risk assessments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the company announced the buy along with news it had received $6 million in Series B funding. “The LogMatrix technology is […]