Fahmida Y. Rashid

When former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr bragged to the Financial Times about having unmasked the “leaders” of the hacktivist Anonymous in February, he probably had no idea what he was about to unleash. Increasingly concerned with the revelations regarding the federal contractor and its partner’s plans to discredit and take down WikiLeaks and other […]

Rustock botnet, one of the most active spam-distribution botnets in 2010, appears to have stopped sending out any of its Canadian pharmaceutical spam, again. The Rustock botnet ceased sending out spam midmorning of March 16, said Mat Nisbet, malware data analyst at Symantec.cloud. According to graphs posted March 17 on MessageLabs Intelligence Blog, Rustock regularly […]

A new security cloud service, which is being targeted at financial institutions with concerns about a new breed of aggressive banking Trojans, promises to detect malware within a PC without requiring any additional software. The Pinpoint service allows companies concerned about online fraud or data theft to scan their Web traffic to ensure that an […]

Research in Motion recommended that users disable JavaScript on their mobile browsers to protect against the exploit that was used at the Pwn2Own hacking contest last week. RIM updated its security advisory on March 15 urging BlackBerry users to disable JavaScript on their mobile browsers or to disable the browser altogether to prevent remote hackers […]

YouTube has been blocked again. Not by a government regime intent on shutting down demonstrators, but by the United States military to free up bandwidth. The U.S. Pacific Command requested 13 popular commercial Websites, including YouTube, ESPN, Amazon, eBay, and MTV, be blocked across the Department of Defense’s .mil computer system, according to an e-mail […]

A distributed denial-of-service botnet has been found in the United States, but not much information is available about it. Lately, every active botnet used in DDoS attacks seems to originate from China, but there appears to be at least one from the United States, said Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks’ Security Engineering and Response Team […]

Intel will use assets acquired from McAfee to build security features right into the chip for embedded devices and to provide cloud security services for mobile devices. Two weeks after closing theMcAfee acquisition, Intel executives explained the rationale behind the $7.7 billion deal in a conference call with Wall Street analysts. Renee James, an Intel […]

University of California researchers demonstrated last year that computer systems embedded in automobiles can be hacked to compromise safety features. This year, the same researchers found ways to remotely hack into these systems using Bluetooth and MP3 files. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Washington have been researching security […]

The Obama administration wants Congress to pass an Internet privacy bill that will control how much information Internet marketing firms can collect as people surf the Internet. Lawrence E. Strickling, an assistant secretary of commerce, proposed the legislation at a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee on March 16, according to Capitol Hill’s “Hillicon Valley” […]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long been an advocatedfor users to have one identity online, and to tie all interactions to that identity. It encourages users to be “more authentic,” according to Zuckerberg. Someone on the Internet disagrees. In fact, the person voicing his objections to the way online anonymity is being eroded was none […]