Fahmida Y. Rashid

Microsoft plans to patch 20 vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system for both the desktop and the server, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Publisher and Windows Media Player.Microsoft is also apparently patching the flaw that was being exploited by the Duqu Trojan earlier this year, although the Patch Tuesday advisory doesn’t mention it by name.For […]

The Obama Administration has outlined its road map of priorities for government agencies that sponsor research and development on cyber-security. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) organized the government’s priorities into four major areas, or “thrusts,” in a report titled “Trustworthy Cyberspace: Strategic Plan for the Federal Cyber-Security Research and Development Program,” which […]

A judge told the group of spammers who tricked users into thinking they’d won a prize in a fake lottery to pay Yahoo $610 million in damages for using the Web company’s name in the scam. Yahoo filed a lawsuit in 2008 against a group of scammers accusing them of running a spam campaign in […]

Kaspersky Lab has quit the Business Software Alliance to protest the controversial anti-piracy bill currently making the rounds in Congress. If passed, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would allow copyright holders to order sites to be shut down just by claiming the sites were selling or distributing counterfeit or pirated products. Many technology giants, […]

An Indian government official has asked Web companies to remove offensive material from their sites. Telecoms and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal asked executives from Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft on Dec. 5 to screen content before displaying them to users in India, Reuters reported Dec. 6. Sibal had said some of the images and […]

Stop Online Piracy Act The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently being discussed in Congress has been much maligned with claims from many sources that the bill essentially amounts to online censorship and has too much room for abuse. V.i. Labs believes it simply wont stop online piracy. PROTECT IP Act The Senate has approved […]

Attacks exploiting an Adobe Reader zero-day vulnerability appear to have targeted defense contractors and other organizations, according to security researchers. Adobe issued a security advisory on Dec. 6 warning Adobe Reader and Acrobat users of a critical vulnerability in how the programs accessed PDF files. The flaw was also being exploited in the wild against […]

Less than a day after Research in Motion patched a flaw that allowed users to jailbreak the PlayBook, hackers have found another security hole to exploit. On Dec. 5, a team of hackers, led by “Neuralic,” released Dingelberry, a jailbreak tool, to make it easier for users to jailbreak their own PlayBook tablets in order […]

Developers need to be trained to think about security while building applications, and security testing needs to be part of the development lifecycle, Veracode said in its semi-annual software security report. More than 80 percent of approximately 10,000 applications examined in Veracode’s fourth “State of Software Security” report failed security testing on their first attempt, […]

Domain Name System services provider OpenDNS has released an open-source tool to encrypt DNS traffic to protect network connections between the user’s computer and the company’s servers. The DNSCrypt tool is designed to secure plain-text DNS traffic and protect users from man-in-the-middle attacks, OpenDNS said Dec. 6. The DNS protocol acts as a phone directory […]

Some Facebook users gleefully exploited a security flaw in Facebook’s mechanism for reporting inappropriate or offensive images posted on the social networking site to access and publish Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s private photos. Facebook moved quickly to close the hole. On Nov. 27, an anonymous poster on Web forum Bodybuilding.com listed step-by-step instructions on how […]

A single federal agency should be in charge of defending the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks, and not the patchwork of organizations currently in charge, according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a 268-page report on thefuture of the United States electric grid through 2030 released Dec. 5, a team of MIT […]