Fahmida Y. Rashid

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 […]

Recent high-profile cyber-attacks have renewed interest in cyber-insurance as CEOs worry about covering the cost of a data breach if, or when, they get attacked. However, the policies they are buying may not help them in case of a large-scale breach. Sony is discovering this the hard way as the embattled Japanese entertainment giant struggles […]

Social networks provide spammers with plenty of opportunities to scam users in new and more effective ways, a security expert said. Social networks have become ubiquitous, with more than 500 million users on Facebook, 100 million on LinkedIn and a reported 200 million users on Twitter. Google claimed it had 10 million users on its […]

As promised, Anonymous has sought to embarrass the FBI with a network attack, this time going after defense contractor ManTech International. “Hacktivist” collective Anonymous claims to have “owned” the defense contractor ManTech International and promised to release the stolen information within 24 hours, according to a post on Twitter that appeared shortly after midnight on […]

Reboot Your Computer Many issues, such as applications not launching, not being able to reach Websites or getting certificate errors, can be fixed by restarting your computer. Try it before crying malware. Patience Is a Virtue This is a corollary to the first rule, some applications take longer than others to open. Give it time […]