Fahmida Y. Rashid

Despite the last-minute update from Apple, Safari was the first to be cracked by security researchers on the first day of the Pwn2Own hacking contest. A team of security researchers from the French penetration test company VUPEN successfully exploited a zero-day flaw in Apple’s Safari browser to win the Pwn2Own challenge on March 9. Security […]

Three universities recently reported security breaches that compromised student and faculty private data. While unrelated, these incidents underscore the importance of educating employees about the security implications of accidentally misplacing data. Nine lists containing personal information on 6,030 students were leaked online by a Missouri State University employee in November 2010, but the breach was […]

A former employee of a defense contractor based in New Jersey has been arrested and charged with transporting military data to China. Sixing Liu, also known as Steve Liu, was arrested and appeared in United States District Court in Chicago on March 8. He faces one count of exporting defense-related technical data without a license. […]

Consumer complaints about malware, spyware and adware skyrocketed in 2010 as users struggled with increasingly sophisticated computer threats, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The number of complaints consumers made to the FTC about malware, spyware and adware more than tripled from 6,012 issues logged in 2009 to 22,813 in 2010, the FTC said in […]

The number of malicious Web advertisements jumped sharply in the fourth quarter of 2010, according to a report from security firm Dasient. “Malvertising,” or advertisements containing malware, was on the rise, with more than 3 million impressions per day in the fourth quarter, double what was found in the third quarter, Dasient said in its […]

Apple patched 27 Java vulnerabilities in its latest update to close security flaws that allowed malicious Java applets to execute outside the browser. Apple shipped a security update that closed Java vulnerabilities in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on March. 8. Some of the bugs could be exploited […]

A morning routine for IT security professionals: A cup of coffee (tea, in my case), a quick glance at the major headlines (I like BBC) and checking the Cybercrime Index. Come again? Symantec recently launched a snazzy new sitelet with a daily summary of current online threats. The Norton Cybercrime Index takes into account current […]

Hackers compromised a private e-mail list used by distributors of open-source software to discuss security vulnerabilities and forced the list to shut down. The “Vendor Sec” security list was used by Linux and BSD distributors and developers to discuss potential security vulnerabilities in the kernel, libraries or applications. An unknown attacker opened up a backdoor […]

Just a week after Intel completed its acquisition of McAfee, it’s back to business as usual as the security company expands its cloud footprint with a new data center to power its security software as a service business. McAfee has activated its fifth cloud data center in the past 12 months, and another center is […]

The average cost of a data breach for an organization went up for the fifth year in a row, to $7.2 million, Ponemon Institute found in its sixth annual data breach report. Total cost is not the only thing that went up, as the average cost per compromised record increased to $214, according to the […]

Security-conscious organizations talk about protecting sensitive information and data security, but few of them actually follow through, according to a recent survey. They haven’t updated their information-security policies even in the post-WikiLeaks world. In a survey of IT executives released March 8, Ipswitch file Transfer found that while 40 percent ranked protecting sensitive information as […]

Just visting a link can result in Acai Berry spam messages being posted on the user’s Facebook profile, even if the user doesn’t do anything on the page, security researchers warned. Facebook took down a number of these application pages “dabbling in Javascript shenanigans” on March 7, but there are quite a few redirect pages […]