Fahmida Y. Rashid

Microsoft fixed 15 vulnerabilities across five security bulletins as part of its September Patch Tuesday release. After accidentally publicizing the patch details a few days early last week, Microsoft officially released the security bulletins and the accompanying patches on Sept. 13. As was disclosed in the earlier pre-notification announcement, none of the patches in this […]

Adobe released more than a dozen security patches that fix vulnerabilities in both Reader and Acrobat as part of the company’s regular quarterly update. Adobe also updated its list of trusted certificate authorities in the wake of the DigiNotar breach. Adobe issued a total of 13 patches addressing critical security issues on Sept. 13. The […]

Symantec rolled out a new cloud-based digital certificate management service to help organizations worried about the security of their Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. With the Symantec Certificate Intelligence Centre, companies can manage all the certificates for their servers in one central repository, even if the certificates were issued by different certificate authorities. The service, […]

A week after uncovering malware on several key kernel.org servers, the Linux Foundation has taken other key Websites, including Linux.com, offline for a complete reinstall. Linux.com, LinuxFoundation.org and all sub-domains associated with these sites were taken offline after administrators discovered “a security breach” on Sept. 8, according to an email sent to all registered members […]

Android developers are encountering problems with software piracy due to the way Google has structured the Android Market, according to a recent report. This is not only hurting developers, but also the consumers who are buying Android-based smartphones and tablets. In a survey of 75 Android developers, 52 percent claimed to have used some form […]

The week’s biggest data breach news had nothing to do with Anonymous or any other online group. Instead, Stanford University’s hospital confirmed that a spreadsheet containing 20,000 patient records had been posted onto a commercial Website. In this incident, an employee of a third-party service provider to the hospital posted the entire patient information spreadsheet […]

Typosquatting is a widespread problem on the Web, as scammers register domains similar to popular Websites to trick users who accidentally mistype a domain name. Several recent Web security studies suggest that Internet users need to be more careful about their typing to avoid Web scams and getting compromised by malicious sites. Researchers at the […]

Someone over at Microsoft is a little trigger-happy on the “publish” button, it seems. The software giant published the details of the bulletins for the upcoming Patch Tuesday release four days early. Expected to go live Sept. 13, the details of the five bulletins fixing 15 vulnerabilities appeared for a brief period on Microsoft’s Security […]

Nothing is sacred to scammers and online attackers, and the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks appears to be no exception. Malicious perpetrators took over the Twitter account belonging to NBC News and posted messages claiming a terrorist attack at Ground Zero in New York in the late afternoon of Sept. 9. Vivian […]

Obama administration officials spoke about the need for increased penalties for computer crimes in light of increased data breaches and hacking activity. The increase in computer crime, ranging from Anonymous-led distributed denial-of-service attacks, Website attacks where data is stolen and general online mayhem, has led the White House to call for an increase in criminal […]

After a cyber-attacker bragged online about having compromised Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar and several others, Mozilla has demanded the companies audit their systems to ensure they haven’t been breached. Mozilla wants the certificate authorities it recognizes in its software, including the likes of Symantec, Verizon and Go Daddy, to audit their systems to ensure they […]

A data privacy breach at Stanford University’s hospital has resulted in medical records for 20,000 emergency room patients being posted on a public Website for nearly a year, according to The New York Times. A patient notified the hospital of the breach Aug. 22, and the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet containing […]