Brian Prince

Hacker Albert Gonzalez received another 20 year-sentence March 26 to run concurrently with the one he received sentence he received March 25 in two other cases. Today’s sentencing brought the odyssey of the 28-year-old cyber-criminal to a close, in a case covering the massive breach of Heartland Payment Systems that compromised millions of credit and […]

Score another for the hacker community. At the Pwn2Own contest at this week’s CanSecWest Applied Security conference in Vancouver, hackers have had their way with the Apple iPhone, Mac and Safari, as well as Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The iPhone fell courtesy of Vincenzo Iozzo of Zynamics and independent security researcher Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, […]

The mastermind behind some of the most high-profile data breaches in recent history was sentenced on March 25 to 20 years in prison. Albert Gonzalez, 28, pleaded guilty in 2009 to charges in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey and faced as many as 25 years behind bars for hacking several major retailers, including BJ’s […]

Google officials say a problem with certain corporate Web pages being displayed in Chinese was due to a bug, not the actions of hackers. According to a report in the Guardian, some users searching “Google executives” through Google were given an English result entitled “Corporate Information – Google Management” that took them to a page […]

Google is adding a new alert system to Gmail to warn users if their account may have been compromised. The feature is being rolled out today and is meant to offer users an additional layer of protection for Gmail users via an automated system that flags suspicious activity and generates a red alert. “It will […]

The country’s Internal Revenue Service has some work to do – and not just because it’s tax season. According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, the IRS has corrected only about a third of the 89 security problems the GAO found in an audit of the agency in fiscal 2008. Among the […]

Mozilla has swatted a critical bug in its Firefox browser ahead of schedule. The flaw, which was discovered by Intevydis founder Evgeny Legerov, had caused enough of a stir to prompt Germany’s B??rgerCERT to advise users to ditch the browser until it was fixed. According to Mozilla, the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) decoder contains […]

Seattle, Boston, DC Top Cyber-crime Hot Spots List by Brian Prince Seattle, Wash. Seattle finished first by a wide margin: It was the only city to score in the top 10 in every category. Nearly 68 percent of Seattle residents are regular Internet users, and almost 29 percent use it at least five times a […]

Recent statistics from the Internet Crime Complaint Center put the amount of losses Americans suffered in 2009 due to online fraud at close to $560 million. But what cities are the most dangerous pound-for-pound? According to an analysis by Symantec and research firm Sperling’s BestPlaces, Seattle ranks as the riskiest online city in America. The […]

Six Easy Steps to Slashing Database Costs by Brian Prince Database Archiving That Defers Hardware Upgrades Between upgrades, migrations and patches, managing a multiterabyte database is costly and effort-intensive. Database archiving, however, moves unused or inactive data from production databases to an archival repository for long-term retention, thereby deferring hardware upgrades by freeing up system […]

Sybase has plans for advanced spatial data functionality in the next release of its SQL Anywhere database. The technology enables the development of spatial applications for smartphones and the synchronization of “on-device spatial data with spatial databases, application servers and enterprise systems.” Sybase is previewing the product at the ESRI Worldwide Business Partner Conference, held […]

The German government has advised users to ditch Mozilla’s Firefox browser until a security vulnerability is fixed. The advisory was issued March 19 by B??rgerCERT , Germany ‘s Computer Emergency Readiness Team, in response to a vulnerability reported by Russian security researcher Evgeny Legerov. Legerov, who is the founder of the Moscow-based security firm Intevydis, […]