Fahmida Y. Rashid

As promised, Adobe has patched a zero-day vulnerability in Flash Player that criminals were already exploiting with malicious Word and Excel documents. The new version with the fixed bug, Flash Player 10.2.159.1, was released for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris on April 15. This update was Adobe’s second emergency patch in less than […]

A Malaysian man accused of hacking into a Federal Reserve computer pleaded guilty to possessing stolen credit and debit card numbers. Government prosecutors said the defendant, Lin Mun Poo, planned to sell the credit and debit card numbers he stole to others. Poo entered his guilty plea on one count of fraud in a Brooklyn […]

Oracle is relinquishing its tight control over OpenOffice.org, the popular office software suite, and will no longer offer a commercial version. OpenOffice.org will be moving to a purely community-based open-source project, Oracle said April 15. While Oracle will stop selling a commercial version of OpenOffice, the company intends to continue working with the community on […]

The White House unveiled guidelines for establishing secure online credentials to boost confidence and business online. The Department of Commerce unveiled the plans for National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace at a release event on April 15 to protect the privacy and security of Internet users by encouraging the creation of secure and reliable […]

A vulnerability in the way Skype’s Android app locally stores data could potentially exposes users’ sensitive information, an Android developer discovered. Skype for Android did not securely store sensitive user data on the user’s Android device, leaving the information accessible to any third-party app trying to harvest data, Justin Case, an amateur Android developer, wrote […]

Oracle is delivering patches for almost every product in its portfolio in its quarterly update next week. April’s update package is much larger than the January update where 66 issues were fixed, but this time Oracle seems to be focusing less on its core database business. Oracle plans to fix 73 security vulnerabilities, including six […]

Verizon iPhone customers finally get some patching love from Apple as the company dropped updates for all iOS devices, Safari and MacOS X-addressing several Pwn2Own bugs and the Comodo breach. Apple announced new iOS updates for all its mobile devices, updated the digital certificates policy on the Mac OS X, patched WebKit issues in its […]

Mike Lazaridis, the co-CEO of Research in Motion, abruptly terminated an interview with BBC when he was asked about RIM’s problems in India and the Middle East over the BlackBerry. Lazaridis called the question unfair, and based on the video of the interview available on a BBC blog, he just may be right. The 89-second […]

Toshiba unveiled a new family of hard disk drives with a security twist: They are self-encrypting. There have been several incidents where a laptop was lost or stolen, and sensitive information was exposed because the data was not encrypted. With these Toshiba drives, IT departments know all the data stored on those systems are automatically […]

U.S. Senators John Kerry and John McCain came under fire from consumer advocacy groups for not including a Do Not Track universal opt-out provision in their privacy bill. However, lawmakers in the U.S House of Representatives and in the California legislature are already tackling the issue. The 2011 Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act co-sponsored […]