Fahmida Y. Rashid

Now that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has successfully disarmed the Coreflood botnet temporarily, the next step is to get the malware off infected machines. The number of “beacons,” or requests from Coreflood zombies to the C&C (command and control) servers have declined by over 90 percent in the week since the FBI raided and […]

Sony may not have confirmed until April 26-a full week after discovering a major intrusion into its PlayStation Network-that consumer information had actually been stolen. Angry Sony consumers criticized the company for not informing them that their personal data had been stolen immediately after discovering the data breach on April 19. Sony shut down the […]

The government has dropped its years-long investigation against a lawyer who blew the whistle on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Criminal charges will apparently not be filed against anyone else who provided details about the program. The Justice Department informed Thomas Tamm, a former Justice Department attorney, “seven or eight months ago” that the […]

The recent Amazon EC2 outage and the Sony PlayStation Network data breach have served to renew concerns in enterprises that cloud computing is inherently less secure than private, self-contained data centers. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Elastic Block Storage platforms were both affected during an April 21 outage that had major Websites unavailable for three […]

The recent data breach at RSA Security is encouraging IT professionals to re-evaluate alternative authentication methods and to reconsider the safety of token-based authentication, according to a recent survey. Nearly 44 percent of IT professionals who were aware of the RSA data breach are now re-evaluating token-based authentication platforms, according to a survey released by […]

Scammers have shifted tactics to use free domain services to launch phishing attacks, according to a research report. A significant number of phishing attacks in the second half of 2010 originated from Tokelau’s .tk domain and Korea’s .co.cc subdomain, according to the latest survey released by the Anti-Phishing Working Group on April 27. The report […]

Ten days after IT administrators cut off Internet access at a federal research facility in Tennessee after a successful spear phishing attack, the laboratory remains disconnected. Administrators shut down the e-mail server and all Internet access at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory on April 15 after discovering several systems had been infected with malicious code. […]

Sony’s PlayStation Network has been down for nearly a week, and the company finally admitted that an unauthorized person had stolen personal information belonging to 77 million account holders. An attacker gained “illegal” access to personal information stored on both the PlayStation Network and the Qriocity online music and video service, Sony announced on its […]

The United States government needs to collaborate with academia and businesses to fight cyber-attacks, the Secretary of Homeland Security said in a speech to engineering students at the University of California at Berkeley. In the April 25 speech, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano outlined some of the cyber-security challenges the federal agency regularly faces while […]

The Texas state comptroller’s office has already spent $1.8 million to mitigate the yearlong data breach in which names and Social Security numbers were exposed. The total cost is expected to be even higher as the lawsuits start rolling in. Personal information belonging to approximately 3.5 million people in Texas was accidentally exposed on a […]

A software development firm has spun off a new company that is devoted to secure Web application development with the goal of helping enterprises secure their Websites from external attacks. As a subsidiary of WDDinc, 403 Web Security will help customers develop and maintain secure Web-based applications to prevent attacks, WDDinc officials said on April […]

Organizations face several information security challenges as they transition from IPv4 to IPv6, according to security experts. The difficulties are compounded by the fact that some attackers are using the IPv6 address space to sneak attacks onto IPv4 networks. Even though the transition to IPv6 has been notoriously slow amongst organizations, many cyber-criminals have already […]