Brian Prince

A company has developed commercial spyware for the Apple iPad that allows employers to silently view e-mail, Web activity and other information of employees even after their histories are deleted. Retina-X Studios announced availability of the technology, known as Mobile Spy for the Apple iPad, last week. The software runs on any jailbroken device, and […]

Top IT Security Certifications That Will Get You a Raise by Brian Prince Security Pays According to a Foote Partners’ report released in April, the market value of IT security certifications have been increasing during the recession as the value of other IT certifications has gone down. Application Security Certifications having to do with application […]

Security researchers have developed an attack technique they say can circumvent dozens of anti-virus products used to protect Windows desktops, including McAfee, Sophos and Symantec’s Norton anti-virus. Researchers at Matousec.com call the technique an “argument-switch” attack. Many security vendors alter the kernel part of system call mechanism implementation by modifying contents of the System Service […]

A 49-year-old man has become the latest person brought down by a federal investigation targeting people trafficking in counterfeit Cisco network hardware. “Ehab Ashoor, 49 … [of] Sugarland, Texas, was sentenced in the Southern District of Texas to 51 months in prison and ordered to pay $119,400 in restitution to Cisco Systems, the Department of […]

Security researchers have reported a new wave of attacks targeting users of Yahoo Messenger and Skype. BKIS (Bach Khoa Internetwork Security) researchers May 7 said the attack comes via messages such as, “Does my new hairstyle look good? bad? perfect?” and “My printer is about to be thrown through a window if this pic won’t […]

File this under interesting social engineering techniques. According to Red Condor, attackers are blasting out e-mails with a thread of messages claiming to be about an important update from Adobe Systems that fixes a denial-of-service vulnerability. The e-mails of course do not contain an update; just malware. But the most interesting part of the campaign […]

It has been a long week for Facebook. Fifteen consumer privacy groups just filed a new complaint (PDF) with the Federal Trade Commission claiming the social networking site has dropped the ball in protecting user privacy. Meanwhile, other groups like the Progress and Freedom Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute cautioned that ongoing legislative efforts […]

Microsoft has a small Patch Tuesday planned for this month. The company said it will ship two security bulletins May 11 to fix vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and Visual Basic for Applications. Both bulletins are rated critical and cover vulnerabilities that leave users open to remote code execution by attackers. “Windows 7 and Windows Server […]

Symantec posted a strong fourth quarter for fiscal 2010 on the back of strong consumer sales. In its earnings announcement May 5, Symantec said revenue rose 3 percent to $1.535 billion for the quarter, reaching $6.01 billion for the fiscal year. The strongest growth occurred in the consumer segment, which “represented 31 percent of total […]

Facebook has fixed a bug that exposed instant messages and pending friend requests. The bug prompted the social networking site to briefly take its chat function offline May 5. According to Facebook, the flaw existed in a feature that allows users to see how their profile appears to others-a design feature meant to improve privacy. […]

Stealing credit card information online doesn’t mean much if that can’t be translated into real-world cash. So just how do attackers do that? Lately, they have turned to abusing auction sites such as eBay in a scheme F-Secure calls “quickswapping.” In a quickswapping scheme, a cyber-crook will use sites such as eBay or Amazon to […]

It would be the definition of an understatement to say the security landscape of a decade ago differed from today. In the year 2000, spam accounted for just 1 in 120 e-mails. Rustock did not exist, and Conficker was not even a figment of our collective imaginations. And then came the LoveBug. From the moment […]