Fahmida Y. Rashid

Adobe warned of a zero day vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that is currently being exploited in the wild. The new critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to remotely take control of the compromised system, Adobe warned in a security advisory Dec. 6. […]

Sourcefire is expanding its network-security portfolio with a new next-generation firewall to provide context awareness and deep packet-inspection capabilities. The new product line combines next-generation firewall, context-aware technologies, integrated application control and intrusion-prevention systems into a single appliance, the company said Dec. 5. Expected to ship Dec. 23, the two appliances provide enterprises with visibility, […]

Mobile device owners worried whether the Carrier IQ software is installed on their mobile devices now can use apps designed to scan and detect the network diagnostic tool. BitDefender released a new tool that can detect and notify users that Carrier IQ’s monitoring tool is installed on their Android devices, the company said Dec. 3. […]

Defense contractor Raytheon has acquired security vendor Pikewerks to expand its cyber-security capabilities for its government customers. The Pikewerks acquisition will allow Raytheon to help its customers in the intelligence community, Department of Defense and other commercial organizations defend against cyber-threats, the defense contractor said Dec. 5. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation believes jailbreaking and circumventing digital rights management on mobile devices and video game consoles should be legal. The formal application to the U.S. Copyright Office requests an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would allow users to “jailbreak” smart phones, tablets and video game consoles, the EFF wrote Dec. […]

The troubles for mobile software vendor Carrier IQ continue mounting as the lawsuits roll in and lawmakers and regulators ask questions. The startup few had ever heard of before last week has been named in at least eight lawsuits over its monitoring software that has been found installed in millions of smartphones worldwide. One of […]

If 2011 was “the year of the hack,” as it was dubbed by Richard Clarke, former White House cyber-security czar, would 2012 be the year enterprises apply the lessons learned and stop the attacks? Apparently not, as security experts are predicting even more sophisticated attacks for 2012. Attacks in 2011 fell into four categories: cyber-crime, […]

Certifications can still lead to higher pay, but for IT professionals, business skills are becoming just as valuable, according to the third-quarter IT Skills and Certification Pay Index report from Foote Partners. In the report, released Nov. 29, Foote Partners found that only 5 percent of the certified skills in its index saw a pay […]

Congressional lawmakers have approved a bill in committee that would encourage information sharing between the government and the private sector about cyber-attacks and threats. The cyber-security data sharing bill is based on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Industrial Base pilot program in which the Pentagon shares sensitive and classified cyber-threat data with defense contractors. […]

As congressional lawmakers debate a sweeping anti-piracy bill, a United States judge has ordered Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft to remove links to Websites selling counterfeit goods from their systems. A federal judge in Nevada ruled in favor of luxury brand Chanel and allowed the company to seize more than 600 domain names it […]

Cyber-attackers recently accessed the critical infrastructure of three cities in the United States by compromising the industrial control systems, a federal law enforcement official said at a security conference. Unknown perpetrators had compromised the supervisory control and data acquisitions (SCADA) systems monitoring infrastructure in three U.S. cities and could have done a lot of damage, […]

Adobe has patched a security flaw in its Flex software development kit that could result in a cross-site scripting flaw in the applications built using the SDK. The bug would have allowed attackers to launch a cross-site scripting attack against applications that had been built using avulnerable version of the Flex SDK, Adobe said in […]