Fahmida Y. Rashid

The pre-trial hearing against the Army analyst who leaked classified government documents to WikiLeaks has revealed glaring security flaws in how the military secured its computer networks. The evidence being heard in the preliminary hearing against Pvt. Bradley Manning centered around documents that were recovered from the Army intelligence analyst’s computer. Portions of the hearings […]

An apparent threat to hack into voting systems and disrupt the vote has the Iowa Republican Party on edge, according to the Associated Press. The state’s Republican Party is boosting the security of the computer systems it will be using Jan. 3 for the first caucus in the 2012 presidential campaign, AP reported Dec. 19. […]

Hours after news broke about the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, South Korea’s telecommunications regulator warned of potential cyber-attacks. Korea Communications Commission raised the cyber-alert to the third highest level, Yonhap News Agency, South Korea’s largest news agency, reported Dec. 19. KCC is stepping up monitoring of Websites belonging to major government agencies, […]

Quarri Technologies is extending its endpoint security platform to Android devices, calling the mobile operating system the “second-largest attack surface,” according to company executives. With Quarri Protect on Q Mobile for Android, enterprises can protect sensitive data from data leaks even when accessed via mobile devices, Quarri officials said Dec. 13. The security controls prevent […]

Younger employees tend to have lax attitudes about computer security and are more likely to ignore IT policies, according to a recent Cisco report. About 61 percent of young employees surveyed by Cisco researchers feel corporate IT security isn’t their responsibility and should be handled by their employer or the device manufacturer, the researchers wrote […]

It was the week of patches as Microsoft finished off the year with 13 security bulletins in its December Patch Tuesday. While the number of vulnerabilities fixed was on par with previous months, the low number of “critical” patches raised some eyebrows. Only three were considered critical, while the remaining 10 were rated “important” and […]

Cyber-attackers have access to various tools to launch their campaigns, such as scanning Websites and applications for vulnerabilities, crafting malicious emails and launching drive-by-download Web portals. They have a growing body of information and automated password cracking tools to breach systems and networks, Imperva said in a report. Cyber-attackers have greater access to rainbow tables […]

As expected, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee postponed further debate on the Stop Online Piracy Act until January, when Congress comes back from the holiday break. During the two-day marathon markup sessions, lawmakers on the Judiciary committee debated and voted on 20-some amendments. When the committee picks up the debate again, it will […]

As promised, Adobe Systems released a patch addressing zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.4.6. The company had announced the vulnerabilities affecting Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x and X on multiple platforms on Dec. 6 and promised a fix within the week. Windows users are the only ones receiving the Adobe Acrobat and Reader […]

Microsoft will start silently pushing out updates for Internet Explorer beginning in January, the company said. The automatic updates will help improve security online because users would always be at the most updated version of the Web browser, Microsoft said in the Exploring IE blog Dec. 16. Many Web scams take advantage of vulnerabilities in […]