Fahmida Y. Rashid

The OpenID Foundation last week released a security bulletin warning of a serious bug that allows attackers to modify OpenID authentication data. Sites that have implemented OpenID 2.0 should check to see if the security hole exists and patch it immediately. OpenID is an open-source project that allows users to prove their identity without creating […]

Skype has patched a security hole in its Skype 5 client for Mac that would have allowed malware developers to build a self-replicating worm targeting the Mac OS X platform. Skype fixed a vulnerability that potentially allowed malicious individuals on a user’s contact list to remotely take control of their Macs, the company said in […]

Chinese security company NSFocus opened its North American headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., and introduced its line of network-security appliances in the United States. NSFocus offers cloud-based Web security services and three hardware appliances with a Web application firewall, network-intrusion detection and prevention, and anti-DDoS) anti-distributed-denial-of-service capabilities. The company made its formal launch announcement May […]

The news that a United States Navy SEAL operation had killed Osama bin Laden in a fortified luxury home in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 1 dominated headlines the past week. All the major search engines, Yahoo, Bing, and Google, exploded with the volume of bin Laden-related queries as people turned to the Internet for the […]

British security firm Sophos has acquired unified threat management provider Astaro to round out its networking security portfolio. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sophos will be able to provide complete data and threat protection for IT, regardless of device type, user location or network boundaries, Sophos said on May 6. The combined […]

The biggest complaint in the wake of recent data breaches, whether it’s Sony or Epsilon, has centered on the lack of security controls in place to protect customer data. A recent Ponemon Institute report found that cloud providers don’t think that’s their job. A shocking 73 percent of U.S. service providers and 75 percent of […]

The Federal Trade Commission settled with Ceridian and Lookout Services over charges that the companies failed to put sufficient security measures in place to protect sensitive information for 65,000 people. Under the terms of the settlement, both companies will have to implement a “comprehensive information security program” and to undergo independent third-party security audits every […]

Sony failed to use firewalls to protect its networks and was using obsolete Web applications, which made the company’s sites inviting targets for hackers, a Purdue University professor testified May 4 to a Congressional committee investigating the massive data breach of the Sony game and entertainment networks. Sony disclosed on April 26 that thieves had […]

Microsoft will be giving IT administrators a break with only two security bulletins in May’s Patch Tuesday. The company had released 17 bulletins in April. Both scheduled bulletins in May’s Patch Tuesday release will address security vulnerabilities in Windows and the Office suite, Microsoft said in its advance notice on May 5. One bulletin is […]

Americans are more concerned than ever about all aspects of their personal security, online and offline, but it’s not entirely clear why, according to a recent survey from Unisys. Approximately half of the respondents polled were seriously concerned about viruses, spam and the safety of online shopping, according the latest Unisys Security Index survey. The […]

Sony didn’t notice the security breaches that compromised user accounts on the PlayStation Network, Qriocity and Sony Online Entertainment because it was distracted by distributed denial of service attacks, the company said in a letter to Congress. Several Sony divisions had been hit by a large-scale coordinated denial-of-service attack in early April from the Anonymous […]

An “anomaly” in the network traffic has prompted online password manager LastPass to notify its customers of a potential security breach that requires them to immediately change their master passwords. Administrators noticed a “network traffic anomaly” that lasted a few minutes from a “non-critical” machine on May 3, LastPass wrote on its blog on May […]