Fahmida Y. Rashid

Software piracy jumped 14 percent worldwide, costing software companies about $59 billion, according to the Business Software Alliance. However, a security firm said the total costs should be much higher. The rate of software piracy hit 42 percent worldwide but is most concentrated in emerging markets, the Business Software Alliance found in its annual report […]

Enterprises interested in using Ubuntu Server to power their cloud infrastructure will be using the OpenStack cloud platform and not Eucalyptus, Canonical announced. The decision was not entirely unexpected. Future versions of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud package will be based on the OpenStack as a foundation technology, Canonical said at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, […]

Botnets continue to be the backbone of cyber-crime, with four of the top 10 threats in 2010 getting regular instructions from malicious command-and-control-servers, Microsoft said in a recent report. Phishing on social networks also became more prevalent in 2010. While the Taterf, Rimecud, Conficker and Renos worms continued to wreak havoc on user systems, attacks […]

The extent to which Microsoft will integrate Skype into its existing products remains unclear and will give security vendors some headaches after the acquisition. If Microsoft’s $8.5 billion deal for Skype goes through, the VOIP (voice-over-IP) provider will become a business division within Microsoft headed by Skype CEO Tony Bates. Skype’s services will be meshed […]

Web users should turn off 3D graphics rendering in Firefox 4 and Google Chrome because of security flaws that would give attackers access to the machine’s hardware, security researchers said. Security flaws in the WebGL 3D rendering engine in Firefox 4 and Google Chrome would allow browser content to access the machine’s graphics hardware, warned […]

The hardware hackers over at iFixit disassembled and analyzed the vehicle location tracker used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The simple GPS-enabled device can be used by the United States government to track citizens without a warrant. The iFixit group rips open new gadgets and examines their internal components and publishes their findings. The […]

Cyber-criminals appear to be on the move, switching from Chinese and Eastern European IP addresses in favor of Canadian ones, according to security researchers. An increasing number of malicious traffic and botnets is originating from servers based in Canada, Patrik Runald, a senior manager of security research at Websense, wrote May 9 on the Websense […]

Facebook may have unintentionally leaked users’ personal information to third parties, a security firm discovered. The leak may be one of the most significant privacy missteps by the social-networking giant. Certain Facebook applications are leaking “access tokens” to third parties, such as advertisers, giving them access to personal-profile data such as chat logs and photographs, […]

HP TippingPoint S6100N Part of the new HP FlexNetwork architecture, the new HP TippingPoint S6100N Intrusion Prevention System propagates standard security policies across all physical, virtual and cloud resources in the data center, branch or wide-area network. Donatelli claimed a 100 percent better performance over Cisco 4270. NSFocus Security Appliances NSFocus introduced three hardware appliances—the […]

Senator John D. Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) introduced an online “do not track” privacy bill that would give consumers the ability to block Internet companies from tracking their online activity. The proposed law already has the endorsement of several major consumer advocacy and privacy groups. The Do Not Track Online Act of 2011 is critical for […]