Brian Prince

Facebook is sparring with security firm Sophos over a threat report touching on malware on social networks. In a report looking back (pdf) on 2010, Sophos reported that a survey of 1,273 people in December 2010 found that 40 percent had been sent malware via social networks, up from 36 percent in December 2009. Additionally, […]

Facebook has temporarily backed away from its decision to allow applications to access users’ mobile phone and address information. The decision to share the information touched off days of controversy as privacy advocates and security pros aired concerns the feature could be abused. According to Facebook, the idea was to make applications more efficient. The […]

A new report (PDF) from Symantec highlights just how much the spread of attack toolkits has lowered the barrier to entry for cyber-criminals. The kits have become fixtures on the digital shelves of the Internet’s black market, and are now used in the majority of Web attacks. According to the report, the most prevalent toolkits […]

Two men believed to be at the center of the theft of e-mail addresses from AT&T last year are now facing criminal charges. Daniel Spitler, 26, of San Francisco, and 25-year-old Andrew Auernheimer of Fayetteville, Ark., were taken into custody by the FBI Jan. 18 in connection with the theft of more than 100,000 e-mail […]

Facebook’s decision to offer applications access to users’ phone numbers and addresses has put the company in the crosshairs of yet another privacy debate. “We are now making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible as part of the User Graph object,” blogged Jeff Bowen, a member of Facebook’s developer support team. “Because this […]

Security vendors, researchers and the Web’s bad actors all made the news this past week. The week closed with news that David Kernell, the man convicted of breaking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, had been sent to prison instead of a halfway house as a judge had recommended. Kernell […]

Oracle is slated to release 66 security patches in its first update for 2011. The patches stretch across several of the company’s products, including the Oracle Sun product suite and Oracle Fusion Middleware. According to Oracle’s pre-patch advisory, the company’s flagship database software has six fixes headed its way. Two of these bugs can be […]

The man convicted of breaking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account during the 2008 presidential election is now serving his sentence in prison – not a halfway house as a judge recommended. According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, David Kernell, 23, is serving his time at the Ashland Federal Correctional Institution in Kentucky. His projected […]

Adobe Systems has changes in store for its Flash Player as part of an effort to improve user privacy. Those changes will start with new integration between popular Web browsers and Flash Player’s management features for LSOs (local shared objects). “Since local storage allows sites and apps to remember information, there are concerns about the […]

Google plugged 16 security holes in the latest release of Chrome, including one that netted the top prize in Google’s bug rewards program. Of the 16, 13 were classified as “high” security threats, while two others were labeled as “medium.” The remaining bug was classified as “critical”, Google’s highest rating. It was the critical bug, […]