Fahmida Y. Rashid

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 […]

Amid a brewing controversy over a tracking feature in Apple’s iOS 4, several members of Congress have called on Apple to explain what the information is for. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote to Apple CEO Steve Jobs on April 21 requesting information and suggesting that the practice may violate the Federal Communications Act. Markey asked […]

A day after security firm Sophos penned an open letter asking Facebook to improve its privacy and security features, Facebook introduced a suite of security tools aimed at helping users stay safe online. The social networking giant improved its social reporting tools for flagging wall posts and photos as spam, improved its secure browsing options […]

Microsoft will begin disclosing vulnerabilities it finds in third-party Windows software in addition to its own products. It started off with two bugs in Google’s Chrome Web browser. In a nine-page document titled “Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure at Microsoft,” the company outlined how Microsoft developers will reveal security flaws in its own and other companies’ software, […]

Oracle on April 19 released 25 security patches that addressed 73 vulnerabilities, of which 36 have been classified as “critical,” as part of its quarterly Critical Patch Update. The critical issues may be exploited remotely without requiring a username or password. April’s CPU contained updates to Oracle Database Server11g and 10g, Oracle Fusion middleware, Oracle […]