Fahmida Y. Rashid

NEW YORK – Microsoft is planning to make the data it collected as part of its botnet takedown operations available as a real-time threat intelligence feed. The company would distribute threat data obtained from captured botnets and other sources to foreign governments, law enforcement, Computer Emergency Response Teams and private corporations, two members of the […]

Organizations have to ensure that employees have the right level of corporate data access to do their jobs, but not so much that they can potentially abuse their privileges. IBM’s newest security software promises to make role management a breeze for IT staff. Called “Security Role and Policy Modeler,” the new software provides customers with […]

Organizations are not taking security considerations in to account when working with third-party data recovery data services, which puts them at risk of a data breach by unscrupulous providers, according to a recent report from the Ponemon Institute.In the “Trends in Security of Data Recovery Operations” report released Jan. 11, 87 percent of respondents said […]

Stratfor, also known as Strategic Forecasting, is finally back online after a cyber-attack shut down the site last month. Stratfor relaunched its newly designed site on Jan. 11, 18 days after a group of individuals claiming to be affiliated with the hacktivist collective Anonymous struck its servers on Dec. 24. The attackers breached Stratfor’s servers […]

ThreatMetrix acquired Australian company TrustDefender to add malware protection and secure browsing to its portfolio of secure device-identification products. The combined companies will operate under the ThreatMetrix name and have operations in the United States, Australia and Europe, ThreatMetrix officials said Jan. 10. However, ThreatMetrix has adopted the TrustDefender name for all the products in […]

Security researchers monitoring mass SQL injection attacks warned the latest one may be nearing a million infected pages using a combination of automated tools and reconnaissance using search engines.The “Lilupophilupop” SQL injection campaign has infected a little over a million URLs since it was first detected in early December, according to a post on the […]

Adobe fixed six critical vulnerabilities in its Reader and Acrobat software, including the two zero-day flaws in its 3D rendering technology identified last month. The latest update affects Adobe Reader and Acrobat X for Windows and all versions on the Mac OS X, Adobe said in its security bulletin released Jan. 10. Adobe fixed three […]

Microsoft fixed eight vulnerabilities in the Windows kernel, Windows Media Player and developer tools as part of January’s Patch Tuesday update. Of the seven bulletins, only one was rated “critical,” according to Microsoft’s security bulletin summary released Jan. 10. The remaining bulletins were rated “important.” There was a reduction in the number of patches rated […]

A federal judge has denied a request that would have temporarily blocked Twitter from turning over account data to United States prosecutors investigating the whistleblower site WikiLeaks and its publication of classified government documents. The request sought to prevent the transfer while a federal appeals court was considering the case. U.S. District Court Judge Liam […]

Israeli officials are investigating a recent cyber-attack that resulted in the theft and exposure of thousands of credit card numbers belonging to Israeli citizens. The attack was a “breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation, and must be treated as such,” deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon told BBC. An individual using the name 0xOmar […]

Oracle has updated its Oracle Database Firewall product to improve enterprise database security and help enterprises block both malicious insiders and SQL injection attacks from gaining access to the data. The new release of Oracle Database Firewall introduces support for MySQL Enterprise Edition and other reporting capabilities, Oracle said Jan. 9. The database firewall protects […]

This past week, the Tech Herald published a detailed analysis of the password hashes that had been dumped shortly after Christmas in the wake of the Stratfor data breach. It took the Tech Herald less than 5 hours to crack the hashes of more than 80,000 passwords, using a readily available cracking tool and a […]