Fahmida Y. Rashid

CANCUN, MEXICO €” Cyber-crooks on Facebook are creating fake profiles on the social networking site to launch their scams, according to data released by Barracuda Networks. The fake profiles are overwhelmingly women. About 97 percent of the fake profiles collected by Barracuda Networks turned out to be of women, Paul Judge, chief research officer at […]

CANCUN, MEXICO €” Companies invest in security to protect their networks and data. But sometimes, they are not thinking about the human side of the security equation, Kaspersky Lab researchers told attendees at the company’s security conference. The €œHumans are the weakest link€ presentation on the second day of the Kaspersky Lab Security Analyst Summit […]

VeriSign, the company responsible for the .com, .net and .gov domain spaces, acknowledged in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was hacked several times in 2010. The company had not disclosed the incidents at the time they occurred. While VeriSign admitted to the breaches in its quarterly filing with the […]

Apple patched a slew of security issues in its OS X operating system in a fairly large security update to prevent potential drive-by-attacks and to fix issues in third-party products.The OS X Security Updates cover Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) and Lion (OS X 10.7), according to the support article released by Apple Feb. 1. […]

Oracle quietly released patches for its Oracle Fusion Middleware and Sun Products Suite to address a handful of security flaws.The out-of-band patches addressed denial-of-service vulnerabilities that were present in several Oracle products, the company said in a security alert issued Jan. 31. A remote user would be able to exploit this vulnerability, CVE 2011-5035, and […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is working on a way to separate legitimate user data from illegal content that had been stored on Megaupload servers so that users can reclaim their personal files. Carpathia Hosting, one of the companies Megaupload had contracted with to provide hosting services, created MegaRetrieval.com to help users work with the EFF […]

Romanian police have arrested a man they believe is TinKode, who broke into Department of Defense Websites and other government agencies. Razvan Manole Cermaianu, an IT student, is suspected of being TinKode, the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism said in a statement Jan. 31. He’s charged with breaking into wireless systems to […]

1) Dont Take Any Data With You Take a laptop with a fresh operating system installed or a phone reset to factory defaults when traveling and download the data once at the destination. With the ability to back up mobile devices online and a plethora of cloud data storage options, this is increasingly becoming a […]

Wave Systems has launched a cloud-based encryption management service to help organizations enforce encryption policies on all laptops across the enterprise. The Wave Encryption Service (WES) supports multiple encryption technologies, including file- and folder-level software encryption and Microsoft Bitlocker, Wave Systems said Jan. 30. Organizations use the unified Web-based console to configure various policies and […]

Facebook outlined some of the security risks and compliance issues the company faces on the social networking platform and related services that could impact its operations in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. After months of intense speculation, Facebook filed S-1 documents with the SEC on Feb. 1 to raise a maximum of […]

Researchers discovered malware that has been used in targeted attacks against defense contractors, government agencies and other organizations since early 2009, according to IT security companies Seculert and Zscaler. The email messages containing the malicious attachments masqueraded as fake conference invitations and targeted executives and government officials, Mike Geide, a senior security researcher at Zscaler […]

An independent regulator for securities firms has warned investors of a growing number of financially motivated attacks targeting email accounts. Malicious attackers are compromising user email accounts and sending trading instructions, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said in an investor alert issued Jan. 27. Similar warnings have been issued by the FBI and the Financial […]