Fahmida Y. Rashid

Businesses can defend against botnets by improving their detection skills, training employees to identify infections, and minimizing attack vectors, according to security experts. Businesses have to improve their detection skills and not rely on preventive techniques to defend against botnets, Andrew Jaquith, the CTO of Perimeter E-security, said in a Web presentation Feb. 24. Businesses […]

President Barack Obama-who during his January State of Union speech highlighted supercomputing as a way for the United States to maintain its economic edge-has requested additional funding for the development of exascale supercomputers in the federal government’s 2012 budget. The proposed 2012 budget included a request for $126 million for exascale computing for the Department […]

Two variants of the latest Android malware have been spotted in two alternative Android application markets that primarily target Chinese customers, according to security researchers. Dubbed “BD.HongTouTou.A” and “BD.HongTouTou.B,” the latest Trojan variants are repackaged inside popular Android apps and distributed through alternative app markets and forums, NetQin, a Chinese mobile security service provider said […]

An Iranian group operating under the name the Iranian Cyber Army hacked the Websites of the Voice of America and several of its affiliates to display a banner that said, “We have proven that we can.” The attack was first noticed on Twitter by @PiratesWeek on Feb. 21 and confirmed by Voice of America a […]

Cisco Systems pulled the plug on Cisco Mail, the hosted e-mail service it launched a mere 13 months ago. While Cisco Mail was “well received,” Cisco found that customers were not interested in hosted e-mail as much as they cared about “social software and video,” Cisco said in a Feb. 22 blog post announcing the […]

Kaspersky Lab expanded its mobile security platform to include Android and BlackBerry devices, the company said on Feb. 22. Kaspersky already supported Windows Mobile and Symbian, the company said. The security features in Kaspersky Mobile Security 9 are not currently available for all four mobile platforms, however. While anti-theft features such as using the phone’s […]

As the violence escalated in Libya, following the mass wave of demonstrations that has swept the Middle East region in the past few weeks, the government took the all-predictable step of restricting access to the Internet. As protesters called for an end to dictatorial rule, Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s government seems to be issuing an “Internet […]

Malware authors are already a step ahead with new tricks as more banks and organizations move towards two-factor authentication to secure their Web sites. A mobile variant of the Zeus banking Trojan is targeting ING customers in Poland by intercepting one-time passcodes sent to customer phones via SMS, according to F-Secure on Feb. 21. It […]

The man versus machine “Jeopardy” battle between IBM supercomputer Watson and two former “Jeopardy” champions may be over, but as far as IBM is concerned, there is more work left to be done. While Watson handily defeated its human opponents during the two-game tournament that aired between Feb. 14 and Feb. 16, the real story […]

The ability to totally erase data from storage devices is a critical component of secure data management, regardless of whether the organization is just throwing away an old system or repurposing it for someone else’s use. Recent research indicates, however, that sanitizing solid-state drives is not easy. Three researchers from the Department of Computer Science […]