Brian Prince

Black Hat USA, the annual convention for security researchers now in its 15th year, is now officially under way in Las Vegas. The convention began in earnest with training sessions on July 21, and will continue until Thursday, July 26. This year’s conference is expected to draw some 6,500 attendees and feature 82 sessions across […]

Officials at the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a Russian man has been arrested in Cyprus in connection with attacks on Amazon.com. The man, Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha, 25, of Moscow, was arrested July 18 on an international warrant. Zubakha was indicted in May of 2011 for launching two denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on the Amazon […]

A new report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) found that the number of brands targeted by phishing reached an all-time high during February and March. According to the group’s Q1 2012 Phishing Activity Trends Report, the number of brands targeted by phishers hit 392 during both months. The 392 brands represent an increase of […]

One of the world’s largest spamming botnets has been knocked out of commission€”though it is unclear just how long the respite users may be seeing from spam will last. Grum, which may have been responsible for roughly 20 percent of the world’s spam, has been taken offline. Dutch authorities got the ball rolling July 16 […]

Mind Games Remembering passwords can be a challenge for any user. According to an October 2011 survey of 300 IT pros by Lieberman Software, 51 percent of respondents had at least 10 passwords to remember for use in their work, and 42 percent said that in their organizations IT staffers are sharing passwords to access […]

Oracle released on July 17 a sizeable security update fixing 87 vulnerabilities spanning a number of products, including 24 for the Oracle Sun product suite. The most critical of the vulnerabilities impacts the Oracle JRockit Java Virtual Machine (CVE-2012-3135), and has a base score of 10.0€”the highest possible rating. From an exploitation standpoint, a 10.0 […]

Skype is rolling out a fix during the next few days for a bug that resulted in instant messages sometimes being sent to the wrong contact. The situation was first reported last week on a Skype user support forum. According to Skype, the issue occurs when the program crashes during a Skype instant messaging session, […]

Symantec has shed more light on why an update to its security software spawned the infamous “blue screen of death” for some of its customers. An antivirus software update that Symantec issued on July 11 was discovered to be crashing Windows XP machines. According to Symantec, the problem was a compatibility issue in SONAR (Symantec […]

Yahoo officials say the vulnerability exploited by hackers that compromised about 450,000 emails and passwords has been fixed. The company confirmed July 12 that hackers had accessed an old file containing the sensitive information belonging to users of the Yahoo Contributor Network. The information was linked to writers who joined Associated Content — now known […]

Yahoo officials confirmed that an older file from the Yahoo Voices (formerly Associated Content) was stolen July 12 by hackers, allowing them to get their hands on more than 400,000 user credentials. Of that amount, less than 5 percent of the Yahoo accounts had valid passwords, the company told eWEEK. Besides Yahoo email addresses, the […]