Brian Prince

The FBI is investigating the cyber-theft of roughly $3 million from a New York school district’s bank account between Dec. 18 and 22. According to the Duanesburg Central School District, there were attempts to steal roughly $3.8 million from a school account with NBT Bank via online access. “Of that amount, approximately $3 million was […]

The new decade has brought a slight hiccup to users of Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager. According to the company, the product is incorrectly labeling updates issued in 2010 as out-of-date. The issue impacts the Endpoint Protection v11.x and Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition v12.x product lines. “Customers running SEP (Symantec Endpoint Protection) are still protected, […]

Google pulled the covers off its Nexus One smartphone Jan. 5 at a press event at its corporate headquarters, touching off talk about whether or not it will be able to compete with other smartphones in the enterprise. This, of course, leads to a larger question of how Google’s latest play in the mobile space […]

Adobe Systems took its share of security hits in 2009. It changed its update schedule and took steps to improve application development, but still ended the year with a prediction from McAfee that the number of attacks against Adobe products would surpass those against Microsoft Office. Officials at Adobe know this; in fact, they anticipate […]

The possibility of receiving bogus medication from online pharmacies hasn’t stopped people from buying drugs online. Now, some scammers may be taking their fraud to another level. On Dec. 29, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned that scammers pretending to be FDA special agents were calling customers of Internet drug pharmacies and demanding […]

EMChas agreed to acquire governance, risk and compliance solution vendor Archer Technologies for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition, which is expected to close in the first quarter of the year, will fold Archer’s risk management products into EMC ‘s RSA security division. According to EMC, when coupled with RSA ‘s data loss prevention (DLP) and […]

A security researcher has uncovered vulnerabilities in Twitter and Google Calendar that could put users at risk. In a proof of concept, researcher Nir Goldshlager demonstrated cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in Google Calendar and Twitter that he said could be used to steal cookies and session IDs. He also uncovered an HTML injection issue affecting […]

Ever had trouble getting a business-critical application to work? You’re not alone. It turns out attackers sometimes have the same problem. And just like you, they need somewhere to turn to. Enter the virtual offices of botnet support and malware quality assurance, places where cyber-criminals can find their own help desks. “Browsing the Web and […]

One of the underlying trends in security of late has been the adoption of cloud-based services. On the acquisition front, the past few years have seen several independent SAAS security vendors get gobbled up. Among those was Symantec’s acquisition of MessageLabs. After more than a year under Symantec’s wing, former MessageLabs CEO Adrian Chamberlain-now senior […]

Microsoft is downplaying talk of a zero-day bug in Internet Information Services). Reports began to circulate Dec. 24 of a security vulnerability in IIS. The issue was due to the way IIS 6.0 handles semicolons in URLs. However Microsoft contends that because IIS must be in an insecure configuration for the attack to work, the […]

Security researchers have cracked the encryption code used to protect most of the world’s digital mobile phone calls, but some say the impact is being exaggerated. According to reports, cryptographer Karsten Nohl led an effort to break the 21-year-old GSM algorithm used to protect the privacy of 80 percent of mobile phone calls worldwide. Known […]

Cyber-criminals have no shortage of incentive to innovate, so perhaps it is not really surprising to see new technologies get wrapped up in malicious activity. Perhaps the best example of the year is Conficker, which used the MD6 cryptographic hash function in some of its variants. At the time, MD6 was brand-new, and its use […]