Fahmida Y. Rashid

After an ethical hacking group exposed a security flaw in Java.com, Oracle quickly patched it. This is the third Website belonging to Oracle with a major Web application vulnerability publicized in the past month. YGN Ethical Hacker Group found an “arbitrary URL redirect vulnerability” in www.java.com, the group said in a post on the SecLists […]

Privacy by Default Unlikely. HTTPS by DefaultUsers who have turned on the HTTPS option on their accounts are secure knowing that their user data is encrypted, making it difficult for malicious individuals to steal personal information. Facebook buries the option on the setti Mixed. Possibly for mobile, but unlikely for the main pages. Vetting ApplicationsThere […]

Iran has uncovered another computer virus targeting the country as part of an ongoing cyber-attack campaign, according to a senior military official. Its capabilities and actual target are still unknown. Iranian experts discovered the “espionage virus,” code-named “Stars,” Gholam Reza Jalali, the head of Passive Defense, an Iranian military unit in charge of combating sabotage, […]

Kaspersky Lab’s founder has his son safe at home and the kidnappers behind bars, the company has confirmed. The Federal Security Service and the Criminal Investigation Department of the Moscow police department launched a raid over the weekend and successfully rescued Ivan Kaspersky, the company said in its official statement on April 25. The police […]

When RSA Security disclosed in February that a third party had breached its networks, the company claimed that it had been hit by an advanced persistent threat. Federal research facility Oak Ridge National Laboratory also blamed its recent breach on an APT. For both RSA and Oak Ridge, the attacks turned out to be a […]

Kaspersky Lab has finally commented on reports that the CEO’s son may have been kidnapped. It told Russian media to stop talking about it. “Kaspersky Lab calls on the media to stop spreading rumors and speculation about the events related to the family members of Yevgeny Kaspersky,” the firm said in a statement April 22. […]

The Michigan State Police use portable machines called data extraction devices that can download personal information from mobile devices. The state’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union wants to know how the police department is using the five such devices it owns. These portable devices can be used to “secretly extract personal information from […]

Critical infrastructure in the United States, including power and gas utilities, remains vulnerable to cyber-attack, and organizations are unprepared to handle major incidents, a research report found. A survey of 200 IT executives in charge of security at power, oil, gas and water utilities in 14 countries showed that 80 percent of the respondents said […]

Adobe patched a critical Flash bug in Adobe Reader a few days earlier than expected. Rogue PDF files exploiting the bug have recently been detected in the wild, Adobe said. This is Adobe’s second out-of-band update to address a Flash Player zero-day vulnerability in the past month. After a round of frenzied patching in March, […]

And yet another cyber-thief faces prison time. Rogelio Hacket, Jr, is the latest cyber-criminal to admitting to stealing credit card numbers and selling them to others. The Georgia resident pled guilty to fraud and identity theft in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.April 21, according to the Department of Justice. […]

More than half of Web applications have some kind of serious security flaw after development, according to a research report, suggesting that software developers need to improve their security coding skills. About 58 percent of Web applications generally fail a security audit the first time around, according to Veracode’s State of Software Security report, released […]

The Ponemon Institute surveyed 275 European organizations in its latest lost laptop report to determine the economic consequences of having a laptop lost or stolen. Participating organizations lost more than 72,000 laptops during a 12-month period for a total economic impact of $1.79 billion, according to the “The Billion Euro Lost Laptop Problem” report, released […]