Brian Prince

As if the past few weeks hadn’t been long enough for Facebook, the account of Facebook board member Jim Breyer was used May 9 to blast malicious links. Sunday morning, some of Breyer’s roughly 2,300 Facebook friends received a Facebook message from his account that asked, “Would You Like a Facebook Phone Number?” and then […]

A security researcher has uncovered a critical bug affecting Apple Safari that could be exploited to run malicious code on Windows computers. The discovery of the flaw is credited to researcher Krystian Kloskowski. According to an advisory from Danish security firm Secunia, the vulnerability is due to an error in the handling of parent Windows […]

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 […]