Brian Prince

Today’s small to midsize businesses (SMBs) are facing a growing threat from cyber-attacks, and are changing their behavior to keep up. In a May poll of 2,152 executives and IT decision makers at companies with between 10 and 499 employees, Symantec found SMBs’ computer support staff are now spending two-thirds of their time dealing with […]

Researchers at AVAST Software have listed the most infected Websites on the Internet. The security company’s first “America’s Most Wanted” roster features a number of sites with a common theme – pop culture. In particular, sites about games, celebrities, anime, and television- and movie-related domains were among May’s worst offenders. Here are some of the […]

Aster Data hopes to increase the adoption of MapReduce by enterprises dealing with big-data applications. With Aster Data Analytical Function 4.5, the company is delivering more than “30 business-ready advanced analytic packages and more than 1,000 MapReduce-ready functions” available for Aster Data nCluster 4.5 and above. The goal, the company said June 21, is to […]

Malware integrating itself into a victim’s Web browser is nothing new. Increasingly however, these man-in-the-browser attacks are being used to successfully bypass authentication mechanisms used by online banking sites, according to a security researcher. Jason Milletary, technical director for malware analysis at SecureWorks, explained banking Trojans like ZeuS, Gozi and SpyEye utilize man-in-the-browser (MITB) techniques […]

Apple has quietly slipped an update to the anti-malware security protections in its Mac OS X operating system. Earlier this week, Apple released Mac OS X 10.6.4 – the latest edition of Snow Leopard – with fixes for more than two dozen security holes. In that release, Apple added a malware signature for a Trojan […]

Breaking bad habits isn’t always easy, but failing to break them can break you. Today’s case in point is using poor passwords. According to an online survey commissioned by F-Secure of roughly 4,500 people in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Germany, about 20 percent of Internet-using respondents use the same passwords for everything from online […]

Facebook’s privacy battles are not over at all. In an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, (PDF) privacy advocates June 16 released a six-point plan for the social network to follow to give users more control over the sharing of their information. For the moment, Facebook does not appear to be budging, but said […]

AT&T said it is investigating reports that customers were able to view other people’s information when placing advance orders for Apple iPhone 4. The issue came as AT&T was dealing with a huge amount of interest in the device, with preorders totaling 600,000 in a single day. According to Gizmodo, the issue appeared when some […]

Sybase has released an updated version of its Advantage Database Server software with a focus on performance and developer productivity. Inside Sybase Advantage Database Server 10 (ADS), the company has packed in a number of enhancements in algorithms and intelligence used to interact with data. Those changes have lead to improvements in things such as […]

Attackers have begun exploiting a zero-day vulnerability to target Windows XP machines. The vulnerability has given rise to renewed debate about responsible disclosure. According to Sophos Senior Technology Consultant Graham Cluley, a legitimate Website pushing open-source software was seen serving the exploit to PC users. Cluley declined to name the site, but Microsoft confirmed that […]