Brian Prince

An Arizona man described by the FBI as a computer specialist pleaded guilty Oct. 20 to participating in a scheme to artificially inflate stock in a pump and dump scam. James Bragg of Chandler, Ariz., pleaded guilty to a count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and fraud in connection with electronic mail-in this case, […]

Malware authors have released a new version of the Zeus crimeware, security researchers reported Oct. 20. The latest version of Zeus, which Trusteer is calling 2.1, has improved the Trojan’s “business logic” as well as its ability to avoid detection by antivirus protection. The enhancements run the gamut from “a 1024-bit RSA public key, which […]

Arbor Networks is pitching a stand-alone version of its Peakflow Threat Management System technology to help protect data centers from distributed denial-of-service attacks. In the release of Arbor’s Peakflow SP 5.5 platform, the company opted to introduce TMS as a stand-alone appliance to help mitigate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hosting and Internet data center […]

Click fraud is rising, and sophisticated botnets are to blame. Click fraud is a scheme where a person, automated script or computer program mimics a legitimate user clicking on an online ad to make money from a pay-per-click arrangement. According to a new report by Click Forensics, the click fraud rate was 22.3 percent in […]

A developer of some of Facebook’s most popular games has been hit with a class action lawsuit about allegations that its applications were leaking user data. Zynga makes some of Facebook’s top games, including FarmVille and Mafia Wars. In a federal lawsuit, Minnesota resident Nancy Graf accused Zynga of sharing the data of 218 million […]

Facebook Privacy: Protecting Personal Information on the Social Network by Brian Prince Remote Logout This time, Facebook is giving users the ability to log out of any Facebook session they may have left active on another computer or device. For example, if a user logs into Facebook on a friend’s computer and then leaves without […]

MarkLogic released a new version of its database Oct. 19 with a host of new features aimed at helping organizations deal with unstructured data. In MarkLogic Server 4.2, the company has added a new ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) tool for managing the data. According to Ken Chestnut, vice president of product marketing at MarkLogic, […]

Two congressmen have sent Facebook a letter with questions about privacy in light of the recent controversy regarding applications exposing user data. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed some of the most popular applications on Facebook were exposing User IDs, the identifying numbers Facebook assigns to users. The numbers can be used to […]

Attackers are advancing their techniques, and intrusion prevention systems need to advance as well. That is the lesson to be taken from new research from security firm Stonesoft. The company published a report about a new trend of what it calls AET (advanced evasion techniques). The techniques allow attackers to bypass current network security devices […]

Facebook has found itself in the middle of another privacy flap. This time, the Wall Street Journal uncovered that many Facebook applications are sharing user information with advertising networks and other Internet-tracking companies. According to the Journal, some of the most popular applications on Facebook-including Mafia Wars, FarmVille and Texas HoldEm Poker-are transmitting Facebook ID […]