Fahmida Y. Rashid

Mozilla patched Firefox 4 to close a major security vulnerability that exposed the browser to attack on all Windows systems. Mozilla also fixed issues in earlier versions of its popular Web browser. Firefox developers addressed a total of 53 bugs in Firefox 4 and earlier, of which 12 were rated “critical” and nine were categorized […]

After six days of near-silence, entertainment and electronics giant Sony admitted attackers had breached the PlayStation Network, an online gaming service, and waltzed off with personal information for its 77 million users. Sony shut down the PlayStation Network and the Qriocity music service without any explanation on April 20 to deal with the data breach. […]

Attackers manipulating Google search to return malicious pages higher on the results page is nothing new. However, researchers have recently noticed similar tactics on Google’s image search results. Researchers reported encountering malicious search results on Google image search as early as April 19. As of April 29, the search results are still poisoned. Attackers are […]

A German software company has threatened legal action against a security researcher for privately reporting a critical vulnerability. Lawyers from Magix AG sent “Acidgen,” an independent security researcher, a letter threatening a lawsuit for creating a proof-of-concept exploiting a security vulnerability he discovered in the vendor’s music application, Dark Reading reported on April 27. Acidgen […]

Despite its popularity in the server space, desktop Linux hasn’t quite captured the hearts and minds of consumers the way Linux fans have hoped. With the introduction of the new Unity desktop interface in its latest version of Ubuntu, Canonical is trying once again to convince Windows and Mac users to give Linux another look. […]

Federal authorities are investigating the continuous distributed denial-of-service attacks that have crippled Change.org for the past week. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cyber Squad will be investigating the DDoS attacks that brought down the Change.org servers for more than 12 hours on April 18, Change.org said on April 27. The grassroots petition Website has been […]

Malicious PDF files are using a new trick to avoid detection by almost all major antivirus scanners on the market, according to security researchers. Researchers from Avast and Sophos independently noticed PDF files making the rounds in March that weren’t being flagged as malicious but had the ability to compromise a machine just by being […]

Coreflood: April 2011 The Coreflood Trojan infected user computers and transferred banking credentials and other sensitive information to the botnet’s command-and-control servers. The FBI seized the servers April 13 and replaced them with new servers to push out new instructions to disable the Trojan on user machines. Rustock: March 2011 U.S. Marshals seized servers located […]

Scammers successfully transferred more than $11 million stolen from small and midsize businesses to companies in China in the past year, according to the FBI. Cyber-criminals stole banking credentials from companies and public institutions in the United States to fraudulently wire millions of dollars to Chinese companies, warned the FBI in a fraud alert issued […]

New fake antivirus scareware pop up with amazing regularity, but some researchers encountered an intriguing variant that indicates scammers may begin targeting mobile platforms. A rogue antivirus masquerading as a Kaspersky Lab antivirus scanner has been spotted on mobile devices, Dinesh Venkatesan, an anti-malware researcher, posted on the CA Security Advisor Research Blog on April […]

A new application can hide sensitive data on a hard drive without encrypting it or leaving any obvious signs that the data is present, according to the academic researchers who developed it. This kind of a technique would allow organizations to safely conceal private information from unauthorized users. The new software uses “steganography,” or the […]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has had some success in dismantling the massive Coreflood botnet and in recent court documents it asked a federal court to allow more time to try to permanently neutralize the botnet. The number of “beacons,” or requests from Coreflood zombies to the C&C (command and control) servers, dropped from about […]