Brian Prince

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. […]

Microsoft is building on its recent security announcements for Windows Live Hotmail with the addition of a new always-on HTTPS encryption option. Microsoft announced the feature Nov. 9. With it, Hotmail users will have the option to secure their entire Hotmail session with HTTPS, instead of just their log-in. The change “joins a series of […]

UPDATE: Barracuda Networks has established a new rewards program for researchers that uncover bugs in the company’s security products. Barracuda’s program follows in the footsteps of similar moves by Google and Mozilla to use incentives to get researchers to turn vulnerability information over to vendors as opposed posting it publicly on the Web or handing […]

Researchers recently discovered that the latest Internet Explorer zero-day, detailed here by eWEEK, had made its way into the Eleonore exploit kit. But most of the vulnerabilities the kit sets its sights on are not zero-days; in fact, many have had patches available for a long time. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising, as attackers […]

A month after breaking its record for the largest Patch Tuesday update in history, Microsoft released a much smaller round of fixes Nov. 9 with just three security bulletins. The bulletins cover a total of 11 vulnerabilities across Microsoft Office and Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG). Just one of the bulletins is rated “Critical” – […]