Fahmida Y. Rashid

Anonymous, Hacktivism Hacktivism increased dramatically in 2011, and for many people, cyber-attacks became an accepted form of political and social activism. While there had been distributed-denial-of-service attacks against controversial organizations in the past, there was more of a focus on getting voices heard by attacking and defacing Websites, disclosing personal information and generally causing mayhem. […]

Thanks to the number of high-profile security incidents and breaches in 2011, corporate boards and senior executives are thinking about security more than ever as they hammer out budget details and resource allocations for 2012. As part of these discussions, many boards of directors, often for the first time, are asking CSOs and chief information […]

Microsoft has released a workaround for an ASP.NET vulnerability to help protect Websites against potential denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, according to a security advisory. The publicly disclosed vulnerability affects all supported versions of the .NET framework, but Microsoft is “not aware” of any attacks in the wild currently exploiting the flaw, Dave Forstrom, director of Microsoft […]

Just before Christmas, Hewlett-Packard released a firmware update on its Website for some of its HP LaserJet printers to mitigate an issue in how the printers could be upgraded remotely. HP also said that not a single customer had reported any instances of unauthorized access to its printers. In late November, researchers from Columbia University […]

2011 was a momentous year in many aspects for the security industry, with high profile cyber-attacks and data breaches, but also a year in which many of the incidents evoked a sense of d??«j??í vu amongst industry observers. “2011 was the Year of the Hack,” Harry Sverdlove, CTO of Bit9, told eWEEK. There was an […]

Strategic Forecasting, an organization that focuses on intenerational security issues, is downplaying the severity of the cyber-attack it suffered over the weekend, claiming its client list had not been stolen. A group of hackers claiming to be part of the hacktivist collective Anonymous attacked the global intelligence think tank on Dec. 24 and stole approximately […]

A new computer, mobile device or other IT equipment generally requires some effort setting up and migrating data. Enterprises also need to spend the time making sure the data is completely removed from the equipment as it is replaced. Organizations do not always stop to consider the security implications of leaving data on obsolete equipment […]

The United States government began presenting its case against Army Private Bradley Manning last week and continued this week. Manning is accused of illegally accessing thousands of classified documents and video and leaking it to the whistleblower site WikiLeaks. The witnesses for the prosecution admitted to a number of glaring security issues, such as not […]

SOPA opponents win a skirmish as domain registrar GoDaddy publicly backed down from supporting the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act on Dec. 23. A small business owner on social news-sharing site Reddit on Dec. 22 posted his disgust regarding GoDaddy’s stated support for the online anti-piracy bill currently circulating in a House committee and said […]

Less than a day after Mozilla released its latest version of the Firefox Web browser, the company released a software update. Mozilla patched six Firefox vulnerabilities in the new Firefox 9, which it officially released on Dec. 20. Four of the issues were rated “critical,” and the remaining two were rated “high” and “moderate.” Mozilla […]