Fahmida Y. Rashid

Hours after news broke about the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, South Korea’s telecommunications regulator warned of potential cyber-attacks. Korea Communications Commission raised the cyber-alert to the third highest level, Yonhap News Agency, South Korea’s largest news agency, reported Dec. 19. KCC is stepping up monitoring of Websites belonging to major government agencies, […]

Quarri Technologies is extending its endpoint security platform to Android devices, calling the mobile operating system the “second-largest attack surface,” according to company executives. With Quarri Protect on Q Mobile for Android, enterprises can protect sensitive data from data leaks even when accessed via mobile devices, Quarri officials said Dec. 13. The security controls prevent […]

Younger employees tend to have lax attitudes about computer security and are more likely to ignore IT policies, according to a recent Cisco report. About 61 percent of young employees surveyed by Cisco researchers feel corporate IT security isn’t their responsibility and should be handled by their employer or the device manufacturer, the researchers wrote […]

It was the week of patches as Microsoft finished off the year with 13 security bulletins in its December Patch Tuesday. While the number of vulnerabilities fixed was on par with previous months, the low number of “critical” patches raised some eyebrows. Only three were considered critical, while the remaining 10 were rated “important” and […]

Cyber-attackers have access to various tools to launch their campaigns, such as scanning Websites and applications for vulnerabilities, crafting malicious emails and launching drive-by-download Web portals. They have a growing body of information and automated password cracking tools to breach systems and networks, Imperva said in a report. Cyber-attackers have greater access to rainbow tables […]

As expected, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee postponed further debate on the Stop Online Piracy Act until January, when Congress comes back from the holiday break. During the two-day marathon markup sessions, lawmakers on the Judiciary committee debated and voted on 20-some amendments. When the committee picks up the debate again, it will […]

As promised, Adobe Systems released a patch addressing zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.4.6. The company had announced the vulnerabilities affecting Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x and X on multiple platforms on Dec. 6 and promised a fix within the week. Windows users are the only ones receiving the Adobe Acrobat and Reader […]

Microsoft will start silently pushing out updates for Internet Explorer beginning in January, the company said. The automatic updates will help improve security online because users would always be at the most updated version of the Web browser, Microsoft said in the Exploring IE blog Dec. 16. Many Web scams take advantage of vulnerabilities in […]

The House Judiciary Committee debated the Stop Online Piracy Act and a multitude of proposed amendments on Dec. 15. The committee is set to resume debate on Dec. 16, and no final vote has been taken on the bill. If passed, SOPA would result in creating a “blacklist” of sites selling or distributing copyrighted content. […]

Cloud storage company Box.net unveiled a new set of tools and access controls to secure the data being stored on its servers. The tools include the ability to limit who can view a file or folder, and tracks log-ins from multiple devices and various authentication options, Box.net said Dec. 15. These security options are intended […]

Criminals shifted away from building up botnet armies in favor of launching targeted attacks on specific corporate networks in 2011, according to security researchers. The overall number of networks and computers hijacked by criminals globally and commandeered into a botnet army has declined each year since 2009, Cisco said in its 2011 state of security […]

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have reissued their warning from last year that industrial control systems that operate critical infrastructure and complicated machinery are still not properly protected. Thousands of industrial control systems that are connected to the Internet lack proper firewalls or aren’t using strong authentication methods, making […]