Fahmida Y. Rashid

The Mac App Store launched with over 1,000 free and paid applications, on Jan. 6, Apple said. The inexplicably popular game Angry Birds is listed, among other games and productivity tools. The long-anticipated Mac App Store hopes to do what the App Store did for the iPhone, making it easier and faster to find, buy […]

OCZ Technology on Jan. 6 introduced solid-state drives that have delivered impressive performance numbers and are designed for gamers and enterprise systems. The Vertex 3 SSD series and the Z-Drive R3 SSD are both based on the latest SandForce SF-2000 controllers, OCZ said. The Vertex 3 comes in two versions, with the Vertex 3 Pro […]

In an attempt to tighten control of classified information, the Obama administration issued a memo outlining requirements and questions agencies have to address as part of their information security evaluation. Issued by Jacob Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget, the memo said federal departments and agencies that handle classified information have to […]

Salesforce.com bought Indian Web conferencing company Dimdim to add critical real-time communication capabilities to its collaboration platform, the company said on Jan. 6. Salesforce.com paid $31 million in cash for the Dimdim acquisition, which closed today. Dimdim offers an “open core” Web conferencing program that doesn’t require the installation of any desktop software and is […]

Nine New Malware Threats that Grabbed Attention in 2010 by Fahmida Y Rashid 20 Million Strong PandaLabs found that 20 million new strains of malware were created from January to October 2010. This is about how many were created in all of 2009. The average number of new threats created every day has risen from […]

There were 662 reported data breaches in 2010, of which most involved thefts of Social Security data, according to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center. The actual number is considerably higher because current regulations in the United States don’t require all data breaches to be disclosed, the group said. “Other than breaches reported […]

Intel claims its latest solid state drive is capable of delivering performance on par with its popular X25 drive despite the tiny size, the company said. Originally announced Dec. 29, Intel showcased the fast, ultra-compact SSD at the Storage Visions show on Jan. 5, which is running in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Show in […]

Marvell showed off a hybrid storage controller that allows users to combine solid-state drives with hard disk drives into a single storage pool at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 5. The storage hybrid, based on the company’s HyperDuo embedded processor technology, is designed to bring the SSD benefits-performance and durability-to desktops […]

Launching a distributed denial of service attacks used to be hard. Attackers had to first compromise computers and create zombies before hitting the GO button. With Anonymous offering a point-and-click LIOC tool and coordinating via Twitter, DDOS has become downright social. A sobering presentation at the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin showed how the […]

Two foreign exchange students from Vietnam are accused of being mules for an international identity theft ring believed to have stolen millions of dollars from online merchants, according to an affidavit filed by federal investigators in Minnesota district court. The Dec. 29 affidavit sought a search warrant to raid the home of two Vietnamese exchange […]