Fahmida Y. Rashid

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies unveiled two new hard drive families specifically optimized and fine-tuned for the audio/video market on Jan. 4. Introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the new CinemaStar families will be available as both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. The CinemaStar 5K2000 family is a 3.5-inch drive and will be available […]

Dell confirmed on Jan. 4 that it will acquire SecureWorks, an information-security services company. The acquisition will expand Dell’s enterprise IT-as-a-service portfolio, the company said. The acquisition is expected to close sometime in February, or “in approximately 40 days,” Peter Altabef, president of Dell Services, said during a conference call with reporters. Although financial terms […]

Chinese government officials touted the success of its extensive system of filtering and blocking Internet content in 2010, saying the Internet is “cleaner than before.” More than 350 million pages, or “pieces of harmful information,” which includes text, pictures and videos, have been deleted, and 60,000 adult content Websites were shut down, said Wang Chen, […]

Malware that is exploiting a bug in Microsoft Word is programmed to download additional malware onto Windows PCs, according to a warning issued by Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center. The problem was actually patched in November’s Patch Tuesday, but after detecting the first pieces of malware in the wild that exploited the flaw, the security team […]

With all the excitement surrounding Android and other open source projects like the MeeGo Linux-based mobile operating system project, the Linux open source operating system seems to be getting less attention these days. Advocates have been predicting the “year of desktop Linux” almost ten years now, but this year’s focus seems to be on how […]

Spammers are using cloud-based storage services to store malware, allowing them to circumvent e-mail spam filters, according to security experts at Kaspersky Lab and MX Lab. Kaspersky Lab detected the click-fraud Trojan, a variant of the Trojan-Dropper.Wind32.Drooptroop family, which has been in circulation since the beginning of December, said Vicente Diaz, a Kaspersky Lab expert. […]

The Russian government will transition its computer infrastructure from Microsoft Windows to the Linux open-source operating by 2015, according to an order signed by the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. According to a Dec. 27 article in the Russian-language CNews, translated with Google Translate, the shift to Linux is set to begin in the second […]

The FBI raided a Dallas-based server farm and seized servers used in the distributed denial-of-service attack against PayPal earlier this month, according to an affidavit obtained by the Smoking Gun Website. Federal agents are looking for clues as to the identity of the hackers who orchestrated the DDoS attack on PayPal, according to the affidavit. […]

An advanced new Android Trojan has been found in the wild and it displays botnet-like capabilities, said Lookout Mobile Security on Dec. 29. Named Geinimi, it is “the most sophisticated Android malware” so far, but its impact is currently limited as the infected apps are available only on Chinese Android app markets, Lookout said in […]

The widespread outage that crippled Skype on Dec. 22 appears to have been aggravated by a bug in the Windows version of the VOIP client, said Lars Rabbe, the company’s CIO, on Dec. 29. A “confluence of events,” which included overloaded servers, a bug in the Windows client and a shortage of supernodes caused Skype […]