Brian Prince

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe was slapped with a £250,000 ($390,000) fine by the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in connection with a data breach in 2011. In April of that year, Sony disclosed that hackers had stolen personal data from millions of members of the PlayStation Network online gaming community. The stolen information included members’ […]

The Virut botnet has taken a serious hit as security researchers joined forces to go after the botnet’s infrastructure. The takedown effort involved researchers from Poland’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), the Spamhaus Project and Russian CERT-GIB aimed at disrupting the operations of Virut, a massive botnet estimated to control 300,000 infected machines. Threat intelligence […]

Security researchers have found new bugs in Oracle’s recent Java update, capping a rough week in security news for Java users. Adam Gowdiak, CEO of Security Explorations, noted in a post to the Full Disclosure mailing list today that there are two bugs that can be combined to bypass the sandbox protection in the latest […]

In the world of cyber-crime, even the list of people who made their way into an attacker’s club of victims is getting exclusive. Researchers at EMC’s RSA security arm now say that phishers are adopting a new tactic to ensure that only certain targets are being hit. The technique is called “bouncer list phishing,” and […]

While tech-savvy police departments may be common staples of television shows such as “Law & Order,” the reality of police work can sometimes be quite different. A case in point is the tracking of Class C misdemeanor warrants in the state of Texas, an activity that for many officers includes the arduous task of verifying, […]

Microsoft and Oracle pushed out patches to cover serious security holes being exploited in the wild. The Microsoft patch released Jan. 14 is aimed at fixing an Internet Explorer (IE) zero-day the company warned users about in December. The patch is the first out-of-band fix of the year for Microsoft, and comes a week after […]

Fortinet released a new security blade for its FortiGate 5000 series chassis firewall that’s designed to appeal to managed security service providers, carriers and large enterprises. The FortiGate 5001C blade delivers up to 40G bps of firewall throughput and up to 17G bps of IP security throughput. It also delivers 9.8G bps of IPS performance […]

A software vulnerability research firm said it has uncovered a way to bypass the Fix It tool Microsoft released last week as a stop-gap solution to attacks targeting a zero-day bug in Internet Explorer. The finding was made by Exodus Intelligence, which explained that it was able to bypass the Fix It tool after less […]

Microsoft is preparing seven security bulletins to start the new year while Adobe is preparing to fix the latest flaws in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Of the seven Microsoft Patch Tuesday security bulletins scheduled to come next week, just two are considered “critical,” Microsoft’s most serious rating for security issues. The other five are rated […]

Microsoft officials on Dec. 31 announced that they have released a tool to help users address a zero-day vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer. The tool is meant to address a vulnerability discovered in the wild roughly a week ago. According to Microsoft, the issue affects IE versions 6, 7 and 8. Internet Explorer 9 and 10 […]

The Obama administration is releasing details of its approach to facilitating better sharing of national security information between agencies and authorized parties. The president on Dec. 19 released the National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding (NSISS), which is meant to provide guidance for developing policies, processes and standards to promote secure information sharing between […]

An audit of the Department of Energy’s Cyber Security Incident Management Program found that duplicative efforts and the inconsistent reporting of cyber incidents are challenging security management. Released earlier this month, the audit by the DOE’s Office of Inspector General paints a picture of an agency in need of a unified cyber-security management strategy as […]