Fahmida Y. Rashid

Citigroup officials are saying now that 360,083 credit card accounts were accessed in the data breach this month, far more than the 210,000 they originally estimated. Citigroup released the revised tally in a letter to customers June 15. The release came after Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen said the company was not giving out enough […]

Two draft versions of data breach bills were introduced in Congress: one by U.S. Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., and the other by Sens. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, and Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark. The Bono Mack draft bill would require companies to notify the Federal Trade Commission and law enforcement […]

Two United States senators have introduced a bill that would require companies to explicitly get permission from mobile users before sharing location data with other third-parties. The Location Privacy Protection Act would close loopholes in existing law, Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumental (D-Conn.) said as they introduced the bill on June 15. The […]

Lookout Mobile Security added a new tool called Safe Browsing to its Lookout service to protect users from Websites that can attack their Android phones. Safe Browsing checks every Website the user tries to access before it loads to prevent Websites from downloading malware onto the device, Lookout said June 15. It also tries to […]

There appears to be a significant drop in the number of computers that have been infected by malware exploiting the Windows autorun feature, according to Microsoft. Autorun allowed programs to launch automatically when a CD or USB drive was inserted into a Windows PC. While it sounded great in theory, the feature was gleefully exploited […]

Virus and malware activity increased in May, sporadically hitting peaks of more than 10 million pieces per day, AppRiver researchers said in its monthly threat-landscape report. Scammers took advantage of major news events to push out new pieces of malware while cyber-attackers continued to target large companies in May, according to AppRiver’s latest Threat and […]

Application Security updated its database-activity-monitoring tool with threat blocking that responds to suspicious database activity. The enhancements to DbProtect version 6.3 include the ability to block real-time attacks and unauthorized activities, Application Security said June 13. Blocking will be added to the audit and threat-management module in DbProtect and will depend on the company’s SHATTER […]

Adobe released five security bulletins as part of its quarterly security update. Three are rated “critical” and two “important.” Adobe fixed 11 vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader as part of its quarterly update released June 14. The company also resolved 24 vulnerabilities in its Shockwave Player and another serious flaw in Flash Player. The Flash Player […]

Users are encouraged to set a PIN code to lock mobile devices to secure data in case it is lost or stolen. However, users aren’t picking hard-to-guess combinations, according to a recent analysis of iPhone passcodes. The 10 most common passcodes used by iPhone users accounted for 15 percent of all the passwords analyzed, Daniel […]

Microsoft addressed 34 security vulnerabilities across 16 security bulletins in June’s Patch Tuesday update. This will be Microsoft’s second-largest Patch Tuesday in 2011 after April’s gargantuan release. Microsoft patched the Windows operating system, all supported versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, SQL Server, Forefront, .NET/Silverlight, Active Directory and Hyper-V, the company said in its Patch […]