Fahmida Y. Rashid

British security firm Sophos has acquired unified threat management provider Astaro to round out its networking security portfolio. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sophos will be able to provide complete data and threat protection for IT, regardless of device type, user location or network boundaries, Sophos said on May 6. The combined […]

The biggest complaint in the wake of recent data breaches, whether it’s Sony or Epsilon, has centered on the lack of security controls in place to protect customer data. A recent Ponemon Institute report found that cloud providers don’t think that’s their job. A shocking 73 percent of U.S. service providers and 75 percent of […]

The Federal Trade Commission settled with Ceridian and Lookout Services over charges that the companies failed to put sufficient security measures in place to protect sensitive information for 65,000 people. Under the terms of the settlement, both companies will have to implement a “comprehensive information security program” and to undergo independent third-party security audits every […]

Sony failed to use firewalls to protect its networks and was using obsolete Web applications, which made the company’s sites inviting targets for hackers, a Purdue University professor testified May 4 to a Congressional committee investigating the massive data breach of the Sony game and entertainment networks. Sony disclosed on April 26 that thieves had […]

Microsoft will be giving IT administrators a break with only two security bulletins in May’s Patch Tuesday. The company had released 17 bulletins in April. Both scheduled bulletins in May’s Patch Tuesday release will address security vulnerabilities in Windows and the Office suite, Microsoft said in its advance notice on May 5. One bulletin is […]

Americans are more concerned than ever about all aspects of their personal security, online and offline, but it’s not entirely clear why, according to a recent survey from Unisys. Approximately half of the respondents polled were seriously concerned about viruses, spam and the safety of online shopping, according the latest Unisys Security Index survey. The […]

Sony didn’t notice the security breaches that compromised user accounts on the PlayStation Network, Qriocity and Sony Online Entertainment because it was distracted by distributed denial of service attacks, the company said in a letter to Congress. Several Sony divisions had been hit by a large-scale coordinated denial-of-service attack in early April from the Anonymous […]

An “anomaly” in the network traffic has prompted online password manager LastPass to notify its customers of a potential security breach that requires them to immediately change their master passwords. Administrators noticed a “network traffic anomaly” that lasted a few minutes from a “non-critical” machine on May 3, LastPass wrote on its blog on May […]

Security breaches and network security threats posed by social media and smartphone use at work are keeping network administrators up at night, according to a recent survey. In the latest What Keeps Network Administrators Up at Night survey from Amplitude Research, 41 percent of respondents named security breaches to their network and another 40 percent […]

Spam volumes and the number of malicious Websites dropped in April, according to the latest MessageLabs monthly report from Symantec.cloud. Spam dropped 6.4 percent in April, making up 72.9 percent of all email traffic and the number of Websites blocked for carrying malware fell by nearly 20 percent, Symantec.cloud researchers wrote in the April MessageLabs […]