Brian Prince

Researchers at Symantec caught spammers using a new technique to obfuscate URLs. Spammers have traditionally tried to obfuscate e-mail headers or bodies to sneak past filters. “So far, we have seen the use of non-ASCII characters or special characters that are not seen in legitimate URLs to obfuscate the domains or links in the spam […]

AT&T has launched a two-factor encryption service for callers. According to AT&T, the service is targeted at government agencies, law enforcement, financial institutions and international business. Known as AT&T Encrypted Mobile Voice, the service combines KoolSpan’s TrustChip and SRA International’s One Vault Voice and supports BlackBerry and Windows phones on the AT&T wireless network. Citing […]

Not long ago, Symantec was going the OEM route for encryption. That all changed in June when the company announced it had closed on the PGP and GuardianEdge acquisitions. This past week, Symantec detailed more of its plans for the technologies, unveiling a strategy that stretches from whole-disk encryption to protecting data copied to removable […]

Lady Gaga fans should think twice before clicking on a link on the singer’s Facebook fan page. According to a seven-day analysis, Websense discovered 93 malicious links on the page, along with an additional 372 spam links. The firm reported similar stats on fan pages for other well-known figures as well, including actor Vin Diesel […]

A former programmer was convicted this week of planting a malicious script on Fannie Mae’s servers after he was fired. Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana of Montgomery County, Md., was found guilty by a federal jury Oct. 4. A contract worker, Makwana was employed as a UNIX engineer at Fannie Mae’s Urbana, Md., facility from 2006 to […]

In a new report, CA Technologies highlighted the growth of Trojans and the twists and turns of the market for crimeware-as-a-service. Researchers identified more than 400 new families of threats, led by fake anti-virus, malware downloaders and bakdoors. Trojans were the most prevalent category of threats, accounting for 73 percent of total infections reported around […]

When it comes to user privacy, this past year has been a long one for Facebook. There have been calls for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the site, followed by significant changes to the social network’s privacy controls. Oct. 6, the company added yet another layer to those controls, which some are counting as […]

Microsoft is poised to break its record for the most Patch Tuesday security bulletins ever for the second time in 2010. On Oct. 12, the company is set to release 16 security bulletins to cover a total of 49 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and the .NET framework. In August, the company set […]

Amazon Web Services is offering a new feature for the Amazon Relational Database Service to help MySQL database deployments scale to meet performance demands on high-traffic Web applications. AWS runs cloud computing services for Amazon. According to the company, the feature-dubbed Read Replicas-is designed to allow customers to create one or more copies of a […]

Cyber-criminals were recently seen targeting BlackBerry and Symbian devices to steal authentication data from online banking customers, another example of mobile devices being on attackers’ radars. Still, security experts agree most of the threats to mobile devices come in the form of people losing their devices or having them stolen. Rather than dealing with malware, […]

A new report by Symantec underscores the threat facing critical infrastructure networks around the world. The statistics tell the tale. In its August Critical Infrastructure Protection Study, (PDF) covering 1,580 responses from businesses in “six industries categorized as critical infrastructure providers,” Symantec found that 53 percent had experienced what was perceived as a politically motivated […]

Adobe Systems patched 23 flaws in Reader and Acrobat today, including two the company warned about last month. “Today’s updates resolve critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader 9.3.4 (and earlier versions) for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, Adobe Acrobat 9.3.4 (and earlier versions) for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 8.2.4 (and earlier versions) and Adobe Acrobat […]