Brian Prince

Last week, the director of Utah’s Department of Technology Services (DTS) resigned in the wake of a massive data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 800,000 people to hackers believed to have been in Eastern Europe. The breach did not happen due to sophisticated malware, however. Instead, a series of configuration mistakes during […]

A class action lawsuit filed against Facebook in California is seeking a whopping $15 billion in damages for privacy violations tied to the tracking of Web users.The suit, which was filed by law firm Stewarts Law US, combines 21 privacy lawsuits filed against the social network in more than a dozen states into a single […]

A malware campaign targeting Facebook, Google Mail, Hotmail and Yahoo user debit card data has been linked to the infamous Zeus Trojan. Zeus is one of the most prevalent pieces of financial malware on the Web. During the past several years, Zeus variants have been linked to major criminal operations around the globe, including one […]

Google closed 20 security vulnerabilities in the latest edition of its Chrome browser, coupling a bevy of security fixes with a new tab-synchronization feature. In Chrome 19, Google closed eight vulnerabilities ranked “high,” seven ranked “medium” and five classified as “low.” All together, Google handed out $16,500 to researchers for work related to this release. […]

Hackers are targeting Websites for human rights and foreign policy think tanks to spread malware and to conduct cyber-espionage. According to the Shadowserver Foundation, attackers have launched a series of €œstrategic Web compromises€ that infect users via drive-by exploits. Attacks targeting human rights organizations are hardly new. In 2010, a report from Harvard University’s Berkman […]

Apple released a pair of security updates May 14 for Mac OS X 10.5 to disable outdated versions of Adobe Systems’ Flash Player and fight off Flashback infections. The Flashback Trojan was at the center of news reports last month when it was discovered attackers had used it to build a botnet of more than […]

A California woman linked to an international phishing operation was sentenced May 14 to five years in federal prison.Nichole Michelle Merzi, 26, of Oceanside, was convicted in 2011 after being tied to a gang that sought to defraud banks of more than $1 million. After a six-week trial, she was found guilty of bank and […]

Cyber-security has worked its way onto Americans€™ list of hot-button issues in the coming presidential election, according to research from the Unisys Corporation.According to the bi-annual Unisys Security Index, 74 percent of those surveyed listed protecting government systems from hackers as a €œvery important€ issue for presidential candidates. Furthermore, 73 percent also counted the defense […]

The Pentagon is expanding a cyber-security program meant to promote information sharing between the private and public sectors.In partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Defense (DoD) announced on May 11 that it is expanding its Defense Industrial Base Cyber Security/Information Assurance Program (DIB CS/IA) to all eligible companies.The goal of […]

A U.S. senator is requesting that the Department of Justice hand over information about how it goes about requesting location data from wireless carriers. In a letter, Sen. Al Franken, (D-Minn.), expressed concern about media reports that law-enforcement agencies are €œworking around the protections€ of the law in order to get records of location information […]