Fahmida Y. Rashid

Spanish police have detained three men they believe to be members of the hackers collective “Anonymous,” according to news reports. Authorities believe the trio took part in a number of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against Sony PlayStation Network and government Websites in Algeria, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Libya and New Zealand, Spain’s national police said […]

Cyber-attackers have breached financial giant Citigroup’s Web portal and gained access to customer credit card information. The company said the most sensitive information remained safe. The perpetrators broke into Citi Account Online and viewed customer names, account numbers and some contact information such as email addresses, Citigroup said in a statement June 9. Social Security […]

Microsoft plans to fix 34 bugs across 16 separate vulnerabilities in yet another large Patch Tuesday release this June. Nine of the vulnerabilities have a maximum severity rating of “critical,” and the remaining seven are rated “important,” Microsoft said June 9 in its advance notification. Ten vulnerabilities-all critical bulletins and one rated important-could result in […]

World IPv6 Day is over, and the Internet didn’t collapse, the sky didn’t fall, and hackers didn’t cause chaos. Most users probably didn’t notice a thing and that’s exactly the outcome network administrators and security professionals wanted. For 24 hours, more than 400 organizations, including Internet service providers, businesses, educational institutions and government agencies, enabled […]

On World IPv6 Day, I am doing something that makes my security-obsessed self cringe: I am surfing the Web without any kind of security software on my laptop. More than 400 organizations, including Internet service providers, businesses, educational institutions and government agencies will enable the next generation IPv6 standard on their main Websites for 24 […]

More than 200 organizations around the world turned on IPv6 at 12 a.m. UTC on June 7 for the world’s first mass test of the second-generation networking standard. Participating Internet service providers, content management networks and Web companies switched to IPv6 networks for a 24-hour test to increase awareness as well as to work out […]

Internet businesses should follow a code of conduct to reduce cyber-attacks and online fraud, the United States Department of Commerce recommended in a new report. The code of conduct should be developed jointly by the federal agency and the private sector. The Department of Commerce should help organize business groups to establish voluntary standards and […]

Oracle fixed at least 17 security vulnerabilities in Java as part of its scheduled update. Oracle patched 17 security vulnerabilities and one non-security-related issue in its latest update to Java 6, released June 8. All 17 vulnerabilities would allow attackers to remotely execute code on the affected system without authentication, according to the company. Nine […]

A team of academic security researchers at the University of Texas launched a new Website to identify names and addresses of organizations that are helping send out spam. SpamRankings is a new initiative from the Center for Research in Economic Commerce at the University of Texas at Austin. The site will publicize “spam havens,” or […]

Hey, Facebook, remember that privacy by default thing that we asked for a few months ago? Well, the facial recognition feature would have been a fantastic place to start. Facebook has enabled face recognition for all its users recently, Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, wrote on the NakedSecurity blog June 7. As […]

RSA Security has offered to replace the SecurID tokens used by enterprises and government agencies to secure their networks after attackers attempted to hack a defense contractor’s network in May. Intruders managed to breach defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s network in May when it bypassed RSA Security’s SecurID technology, RSA Security Chairman Art Coviello acknowledged in […]

NEW YORK-Cyber-criminals are simultaneously taking advantage of the cloud’s benefits to launch attacks as well as targeting organizations’ cloud services, security experts said. As organizations increasingly virtualize their data centers and move their applications to the cloud, attackers are beginning to think, “Let’s attack here,” Allen Vance, director of product management of the data and […]