Fahmida Y. Rashid

Microsoft plans to patch 22 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Windows, Visio and Visual Studio as part of the August Patch Tuesday release. Microsoft will release 13 security bulletins, two of which are rated “critical,” the company said Aug. 4. Nine were rated as “important” and the final two were listed as “moderate” according to the […]

Modern automobiles are increasingly becoming more like computers, with features such as the in-car navigation system and multiple sensors tracking the fuel tank and overall health of the engine. Don Bailey and Matthew Solnik, two senior security researchers from iSEC, showed how text messages sent over the GSM network could be used to unlock and […]

Hackers penetrated the United Nations, technology companies, defense contractors as well as the United States and foreign government networks as part of a massive five-year cyber-spying campaign, according to a stunning report by McAfee researchers. Dubbed “Operation Shady RAT,” the attackers penetrated 72 target networks since July 2006, McAfee disclosed on Aug.3. Government agencies in […]

LAS VEGAS-While McAfee identified 72 organizations hit by Operation Shady RAT, researchers believe it’s possible “thousands” more organizations or individuals have been attacked. McAfee has been aware of the attacks since 2009 but did not know the actual scope of the attacks until this March when researchers found a command-and-control server used to launch and […]

Facebook has joined the handful of companies who pay bug bounties to researchers who discover vulnerabilities. Most Website flaws, such as cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery and remote code injection, would net the discoverer $500, Facebook said July 29. The company said it will pay more for serious issues but declined to specify the maximum […]

Writing about information security, I tend to be very paranoid. This is a good thing as it means I am creating complicated passwords, regularly clearing out my browser history and cookies, and never click on links in my e-mail, even when it’s my company’s HR department demanding I fill out a survey about my benefits. […]

Security professionals heading to Black Hat can look forward to the Pwnie Awards, the hacker version of the Academy Awards, this week. The winners of the Pwnie Awards will be announced Aug. 3 at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. Instead of little Oscars, award recipients receive gold-painted My Little Pony statuettes, a […]

Businesses often time big product announcements just before a big technology trade show, so why should hacktivist collective Anonymous be any different? A few days before the annual hacker conference Black Hat and DEFcon began in Las Vegas, a solitary developer who claim to be a member of the loose-knit group posted some code for […]

Developers behind LibreOffice have declared the latest version of the open-source productivity software suite to be enterprise-ready. The latest release of LibreOffice, version 3.4.2, was announced by the Document Foundation on Aug. 1. The previous versions were aimed primarily at early adopters and power users and were not recommended for production environments. “LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes […]

Anonymous dominated headlines this past week, as law enforcement officials arrested suspected members and the collective continued its online mayhem. British authorities arrested an 18-year old male from a residential address in the Shetland Islands, a remote archipelago off the north shore of the Scottish mainland, and issued a press release claiming they’darrested “Topiary.” Scotland […]

Security professionals descending on Las Vegas this week for the annual Black Hat conference will see lots of creative hacking. More than 50 presentations are planned for Black Hat 2011, which runs through Aug. 4, with security researchers disclosing more than 20 software and system vulnerabilities. Presentations will detail security flaws in everything from USB […]

Malware is increasingly being used as advanced persistent threats against enterprises, according to the latest quarterly report from Cisco. There were 287,298 “unique malware encounters” in June 2011, double what was found in March, according to a Global Threat Report from Cisco Security Intelligence Operations released Aug. 1. Since the beginning of 2011, unique malware […]