Brian Prince

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, […]

Mozilla has patched the Firefox flaw exploited during the Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest security conference, held March 24 to 26. The bug was discovered and exploited by a researcher from MWR InfoSecurity going by the hacker alias “Nils.” According to Mozilla, the vulnerability was a memory corruption flaw. “By moving DOM nodes between documents, […]

URL shortening has taken a bit of a beating in the security community during the past two years, particularly as the popularity of Twitter has taken off. But not everyone believes the real-world dangers of URL shortening are in line with the hype. Fears of shortened URLs are being overblown, said Zscaler researcher Julien Sobrier, […]

Foxit Software plans to follow Adobe Systems’ lead and add a dialog box giving users a heads-up about a new attack tactic involving malicious PDF files. The security issue was uncovered by Didier Stevens, an IT security consultant with Contraste Europe, who discovered a way to get PDF viewers such as Adobe Reader and Foxit […]

Google and McAfee have uncovered evidence that a campaign of politically motivated cyber-attacks is targeting critics of a Chinese-backed mining operation in Vietnam. In a blog post, Neel Mehta of Google’s security team noted the cyber-assault on Vietnamese activists is separate from the Aurora incident the company reported in January, and potentially involves tens of […]

A security researcher said he has found a new way to exploit Adobe Reader and other PDF-viewing software without using an actual security vulnerability. The researcher, Didier Stevens, has developed a proof-of-concept PDF file that launches an embedded executable. According to Stevens, PDF viewers like Adobe Reader and Foxit Software’s Foxit Reader do not allow […]

IBM is working with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to develop a prototype security system utilizing advanced analytics to stop cyber-attacks. The research project will use streaming analytics in an effort to enable the FAA to better correlate and analyze data. According to an IBM statement March 30, the system will “look retrospectively at event […]