Brian Prince

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 […]

With calls for tighter privacy controls on the Web getting louder and louder, new research shows many users are still forgoing privacy controls and exposing themselves to risk on social networks. According to a survey of 2,000 American households by Consumer Reports, 52 percent of adults using sites such as Facebook and MySpace engage in […]

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania failed to adopt official guidelines governing the use of tracking software on school laptops and left the technology open to abuse, according to a report released May 3. The 72-page report was commissioned by the school district (PDF) in response to Webcam spying allegations leveled by the family […]

Hackers have released software to jailbreak the Apple iPad as well as the latest version of the iPhone OS. The software, dubbed Spirit, works on the iPad, the iPod Touch and iPhones running OS versions 3.1.2, 3.1.3 and 3.2. With Spirit, users can run programs not approved by Apple. Unlike other jailbreaks, Spirit is untethered, […]

Enterprise adoption of virtualization is continuing its upward trend. But what about security? According to Prism Microsystems, organizations are slacking when it comes to protecting virtualized environments. A survey of 302 IT managers, security pros, auditors and administrators about their virtual deployments paints a picture of a landscape where the hypervisor is unprotected and separation […]

Microsoft has released a new version of its Producer add-in component to fix a vulnerability previously left unpatched. In March, Microsoft issued a patch for a buffer overflow vulnerability in Microsoft Movie Maker that also affected users of Producer, which is a free, downloadable tool for Office PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 designed to make it […]

8 Database Consolidation Strategy Tips for DBAs by Brian Prince Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail Forrester reported that about 30 percent of database consolidation projects fail because of poor planning. There should be goals in mind on exactly what you are trying to accomplish and metrics to track those goals, such as reducing […]