Fahmida Y. Rashid

The agency governing Internet addresses has approved .xxx as a new top-level domain, despite objections from civil rights groups, the adult entertainment industry and even parent groups. The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers approved the creation of the .xxx suffix on March 18 in a 9-3 vote. Four board members abstained from the […]

The former Goldman Sachs computer programmer was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing proprietary code used by the Wall Street bank’s high-frequency trading system. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote handed down a 97-month sentence, well within the eight to ten years the prosecutors had sought, and fined Sergey Aleynikov $12,500 on March 18. […]

Data breaches, mobile security, and two major vulnerabilities seemed to be on everyone’s mind this week. Just as the week was winding down, RSA posted a vague letter on its Web site reporting its network had been breached by unknown attackers and that some information had been stolen. RSA knew exactly what had been stolen, […]

The network of one the world’s largest and trusted security firms has been breached, and an unknown amount of information about its popular multifactor authentication technology has been stolen. Customers are worried about what form potential attacks could take. The SecurID information that was stolen would not allow attackers to launch a successful direct attack […]

Following RSA’s announcement of a data breach, there’s really nothing for SecurID customers to do but to monitor their systems in hopes of foiling an attack, if it ever comes. RSA Security, a division of storage giant EMC, announced late March 17 it had been breached by attackers and that some information about its SecurID […]

EMC’s RSA Security acknowledged it had been hit by an “extremely sophisticated” attack and that information related to the SecurID two-factor authentication products have been stolen. Intruders succeeded in breaching RSA networks “recently” as part of an Advanced Persistent Threat attack, Art Coviello, executive chairman of RSA Security, wrote in an open letter to customers […]

When former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr bragged to the Financial Times about having unmasked the “leaders” of the hacktivist Anonymous in February, he probably had no idea what he was about to unleash. Increasingly concerned with the revelations regarding the federal contractor and its partner’s plans to discredit and take down WikiLeaks and other […]

Rustock botnet, one of the most active spam-distribution botnets in 2010, appears to have stopped sending out any of its Canadian pharmaceutical spam, again. The Rustock botnet ceased sending out spam midmorning of March 16, said Mat Nisbet, malware data analyst at Symantec.cloud. According to graphs posted March 17 on MessageLabs Intelligence Blog, Rustock regularly […]

A new security cloud service, which is being targeted at financial institutions with concerns about a new breed of aggressive banking Trojans, promises to detect malware within a PC without requiring any additional software. The Pinpoint service allows companies concerned about online fraud or data theft to scan their Web traffic to ensure that an […]

Research in Motion recommended that users disable JavaScript on their mobile browsers to protect against the exploit that was used at the Pwn2Own hacking contest last week. RIM updated its security advisory on March 15 urging BlackBerry users to disable JavaScript on their mobile browsers or to disable the browser altogether to prevent remote hackers […]

YouTube has been blocked again. Not by a government regime intent on shutting down demonstrators, but by the United States military to free up bandwidth. The U.S. Pacific Command requested 13 popular commercial Websites, including YouTube, ESPN, Amazon, eBay, and MTV, be blocked across the Department of Defense’s .mil computer system, according to an e-mail […]

A distributed denial-of-service botnet has been found in the United States, but not much information is available about it. Lately, every active botnet used in DDoS attacks seems to originate from China, but there appears to be at least one from the United States, said Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks’ Security Engineering and Response Team […]