Brian Prince

Adobe Systems is enabling a silent updating feature in two products in an effort to ensure that users are running the most secure versions of the company’s software. With the new updater, Windows users can configure Adobe Reader and Acrobat to automatically download updates without user interaction. Right now, users have the choice of handling […]

Microsoft is planning a significant Patch Tuesday update April 13 to address 25 vulnerabilities across Windows, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange. In its pre-patch advisory April 8, Microsoft said there would be a total of 11 security bulletins issued. Five of the 11 are rated critical and affect Windows. Of the remaining six, all but […]

Oracle officials know they have some questions to answer about the road map for MySQL, and they plan to use the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo next week to do it. At the conference, which will be held from April 12 to 15 in Santa Clara, Calif., Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven is expected […]

Adobe Systems is recommending that concerned users reconfigure the settings in Adobe Reader to thwart an attack that allows embedded executables in PDF files to launch. The situation was uncovered by security researcher Didier Stevens, who developed a proof-of-concept demonstrating how an attack could leverage launch action functionality in PDF viewing software to run embedded […]

Law enforcement officials from Romania and the United States arrested 70 members of three different organized crime groups for their roles in an online scam targeting eBay. The arrests came in a series of raids by the Romanian Directorate for Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism that took place Sunday at more than 100 locations. […]

The majority of federal IT decision makers in the national defense and security department agencies aren’t expecting many changes from the newly named cyber-security coordinator. That’s according to a survey of 201 IT pros commissioned by Lumension. The survey, conducted last month by Clarus Research Group, found that more than half “expect only minor policy […]

The Vietnamese government rebuffed charges by Google that Vietnamese PC owners were being targeted by attackers. The comments, posted online Saturday, were in response to a blog post by a member of Google’s security team outlining a malware attack. According to Google’s Neel Mehta, the infected computers were used to build a botnet that launched […]

As intriguing as the idea of a mysterious cyber-criminal hacking his way into a corporate network sounds, the majority of data breaches are the work of insiders. An employee copies data to a USB device and leaves it in a cab; a contractor misplaces a CD with customer information-these are common causes of data breaches. […]

Hackers have been busy at work on the Apple iPad. How busy? Less than a day after its April 3 release, MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev Team announced a crack for Apple’s latest device. For those who don’t know, jailbreaking is a process that allows users to run any program on their devices, instead of […]

Microsoft has released the final community technology preview for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse appliance, though it appears to have pushed back the final release of the product. The appliance, formerly known as Project Madison, was slated to be ready in the first half of 2010. However, Microsoft said it is still […]

A survey of IT professionals has painted a troubling picture of enterprise approaches to cloud computing security. According to the survey, which was done by Symantec and the Ponemon Institute, many organizations are not doing their due diligence when it comes to adopting cloud technology-a situation that may partly be due to ad hoc delegation […]

On April 1, 2009, the Conficker worm played an April Fools’ Day joke of its own on those who predicted an Internet meltdown. But instead of a meltdown, infected computers only got a slight update in functionality, followed by brief attempts to rope them into rogue antivirus scams and then months of silence. Right now, […]