Brian Prince

Embedded Systems Under Attack As the number of connected devices continues to grow, researchers have started to pay more attention to the security of embedded computer systems and have discovered all too often that many of these systems were not designed with security in mind. At the Black Hat security conferences over the past two […]

Google has addressed a security hole affecting Google Webmaster Tools that gave users access to obsolete accounts they should not have been able to log into. News of the situation spread across the Web Tuesday night after reports surfaced about it on search engine optimization (SEO) blogs and news sites. According to Google, for several […]

South Carolina Security Goes South In October, officials in South Carolina’s Department of Revenue admitted that information belonging to as many as 4.4 million people and businesses had been compromised in a breach. In the aftermath of the breach, it was revealed that an employee was tricked into opening a file laced with malware. From […]

The White House is reportedly making a major push to get input from various interest groups on the draft of an executive order that would implement some of the provisions written into the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which fell short of the votes needed to send the legislation to a final vote in the Senate. […]

Facebook is taking a page from Google and other sites by making HTTPS default for user connections in North America, following through on plans announced last year. The move is meant to provide secure browsing for part of the social network’s user base, which as of September is counted by the company to be more […]

Virtualization software vendor VMware released an update this month to fix a security issue in its vSphere API. The update patches a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability in ESX and ESXi, and was accompanied by several open-source security fixes for the ESX Service Console. “The VMware vSphere API contains a denial-of-service vulnerability,” the company explained in an […]

The latest Transparency Report from Google shows government requests for information jumped dramatically during the past three years. According to Google, there were 20,938 such inquiries from government entities around the world during the first half of 2012 for information about 34,614 accounts. The number of requests represents a significant hike from the second half […]

Microsoft pushed out six security bulletins covering 19 vulnerabilities across Windows, Internet Explorer and several other products. Four of the six updates are rated “Critical,” Microsoft’s highest threat rating. Of those four, two should get immediate attention – MS12-071 and MS12-075, the company said. MS12-071 addresses three security issues in Internet Explorer (IE), none of […]

Research from security vendor BitDefender underscored recently what many Windows users already know—running a machine without antivirus can be risky. In an analysis, the firm found 15 percent of what the security firm classifies as the malware families most favored cyber-criminals this year were able to successfully run on Windows 8 with Windows Defender on. […]

Google has followed through on plans to provide a “do not track” feature in the latest version of its Chrome browser. In Chrome 23, users have the option to select “do not track,” which will include a request with their browser traffic for Websites to disable tracking. The move comes after the company announced in […]