Brian Prince

Rumors are circulating that Symantec will buy VeriSign’s authentication unit for a reported $1.3 billion. If true, the deal would be the latest attempt by VeriSign to sell off its security business. According to reports, speculation about a deal began when VeriSign’s chief financial officer, Brian Robins, withdrew from a JPMorgan Chase industry conference Tuesday. […]

Twenty-four hours after acquisition rumors hit the press, Symantec announced it has signed a definitive agreement to buy VeriSign’s identity and authentication business. Symantec will pay $1.28 billion, and will acquire VeriSign Trust Services along with VeriSign’s SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate services, PKI (public-key infrastructure) services and the VIP (VeriSign Identity Protection) Authentication Service. […]

Microsoft filed two separate lawsuits the week of May 17 describing an emerging form of fraud affecting online advertising. The lawsuits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, accuse a company called RedOrbit and unnamed defendants of being involved in click fraud-related activity Microsoft calls “click laundering.” “Online ad fraud […]

Researchers from Sunbelt Software found a new Trojan botnet creator tool called TwitterNet Builder, which they reported on May 13. In August 2009, Arbor Networks’ Jose Nazario reported finding numerous Twitter accounts being used to send commands to compromised machines. Here, researchers have found an account passing commands to Trojans created by the builder. The […]

Microsoft is adding a number of security enhancements under the hood to help protect Hotmail users. The changes will be rolled out in the coming months as part of a major overhaul of Hotmail and will cross a number of areas, including general account security and password recovery. In a conversation with eWEEK, John Scarrow, […]

Microsoft is warning users about a new security vulnerability impacting the 64-bit edition of Windows 7 that leaves systems open to compromise. The flaw, which lies in the Canonical Display Driver (CDD), also affects Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 as well as Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium systems. The CDD is used by desktop […]

The recent outcry about user privacy has prompted Facebook to announce plans to simplify its settings in the coming weeks. The plans were made public by Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s director of public policy, during a radio interview (listen here at the 26:30 mark) on the Kojo Nnamdi public radio show on WAMU 88.5 FM. “Now, […]

MySpace is taking advantage of anger about Facebook’s privacy controls to win over users with simplified controls, but it remains to be seen whether it will help the site gain back market share. On Monday, MySpace announced it will give users the option of choosing one privacy setting for all the information in their profile […]

The war on the words between Apple and Adobe Systems has prompted plenty of speculation about the fate of HTML5. But while HTML5 remains a work in progress, the one thing that is certain is developers who adopt HTML5 will have a new set of features to consider as part of the application security development […]

A new type of botnet composed of Web servers rather than PCs has been discovered launching distributed-denial-of-service attacks, security company Imperva said May 12. The botnet, which consists of hundreds of Web servers, is a change of pace of sorts for attackers, who often use compromised PCs to build their botnets. The botnet operators refer […]

New research from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) ties a single crime syndicate to more than 60 percent of the phishing attacks in the second half of 2009. According to the report (PDF), a cyber-gang known as Avalanche was responsible for 66 percent of all phishing attacks during the last six months of 2009 and […]

Amid a controversy about privacy, Facebook unveiled new security features designed to protect user accounts. “Over the last few weeks, we’ve been testing a new feature that allows you to approve the devices you commonly use to log in and then to be notified whenever your account is accessed from a device you haven’t approved,” […]