Fahmida Y. Rashid

Nine New Malware Threats that Grabbed Attention in 2010 by Fahmida Y Rashid 20 Million Strong PandaLabs found that 20 million new strains of malware were created from January to October 2010. This is about how many were created in all of 2009. The average number of new threats created every day has risen from […]

There were 662 reported data breaches in 2010, of which most involved thefts of Social Security data, according to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center. The actual number is considerably higher because current regulations in the United States don’t require all data breaches to be disclosed, the group said. “Other than breaches reported […]

Intel claims its latest solid state drive is capable of delivering performance on par with its popular X25 drive despite the tiny size, the company said. Originally announced Dec. 29, Intel showcased the fast, ultra-compact SSD at the Storage Visions show on Jan. 5, which is running in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Show in […]

Marvell showed off a hybrid storage controller that allows users to combine solid-state drives with hard disk drives into a single storage pool at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 5. The storage hybrid, based on the company’s HyperDuo embedded processor technology, is designed to bring the SSD benefits-performance and durability-to desktops […]

Launching a distributed denial of service attacks used to be hard. Attackers had to first compromise computers and create zombies before hitting the GO button. With Anonymous offering a point-and-click LIOC tool and coordinating via Twitter, DDOS has become downright social. A sobering presentation at the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin showed how the […]

Two foreign exchange students from Vietnam are accused of being mules for an international identity theft ring believed to have stolen millions of dollars from online merchants, according to an affidavit filed by federal investigators in Minnesota district court. The Dec. 29 affidavit sought a search warrant to raid the home of two Vietnamese exchange […]

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies unveiled two new hard drive families specifically optimized and fine-tuned for the audio/video market on Jan. 4. Introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the new CinemaStar families will be available as both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. The CinemaStar 5K2000 family is a 3.5-inch drive and will be available […]

Dell confirmed on Jan. 4 that it will acquire SecureWorks, an information-security services company. The acquisition will expand Dell’s enterprise IT-as-a-service portfolio, the company said. The acquisition is expected to close sometime in February, or “in approximately 40 days,” Peter Altabef, president of Dell Services, said during a conference call with reporters. Although financial terms […]

Chinese government officials touted the success of its extensive system of filtering and blocking Internet content in 2010, saying the Internet is “cleaner than before.” More than 350 million pages, or “pieces of harmful information,” which includes text, pictures and videos, have been deleted, and 60,000 adult content Websites were shut down, said Wang Chen, […]

Malware that is exploiting a bug in Microsoft Word is programmed to download additional malware onto Windows PCs, according to a warning issued by Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center. The problem was actually patched in November’s Patch Tuesday, but after detecting the first pieces of malware in the wild that exploited the flaw, the security team […]

With all the excitement surrounding Android and other open source projects like the MeeGo Linux-based mobile operating system project, the Linux open source operating system seems to be getting less attention these days. Advocates have been predicting the “year of desktop Linux” almost ten years now, but this year’s focus seems to be on how […]

Spammers are using cloud-based storage services to store malware, allowing them to circumvent e-mail spam filters, according to security experts at Kaspersky Lab and MX Lab. Kaspersky Lab detected the click-fraud Trojan, a variant of the Trojan-Dropper.Wind32.Drooptroop family, which has been in circulation since the beginning of December, said Vicente Diaz, a Kaspersky Lab expert. […]