Fahmida Y. Rashid

The House Judiciary Committee debated the Stop Online Piracy Act and a multitude of proposed amendments on Dec. 15. The committee is set to resume debate on Dec. 16, and no final vote has been taken on the bill. If passed, SOPA would result in creating a “blacklist” of sites selling or distributing copyrighted content. […]

Cloud storage company Box.net unveiled a new set of tools and access controls to secure the data being stored on its servers. The tools include the ability to limit who can view a file or folder, and tracks log-ins from multiple devices and various authentication options, Box.net said Dec. 15. These security options are intended […]

Criminals shifted away from building up botnet armies in favor of launching targeted attacks on specific corporate networks in 2011, according to security researchers. The overall number of networks and computers hijacked by criminals globally and commandeered into a botnet army has declined each year since 2009, Cisco said in its 2011 state of security […]

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have reissued their warning from last year that industrial control systems that operate critical infrastructure and complicated machinery are still not properly protected. Thousands of industrial control systems that are connected to the Internet lack proper firewalls or aren’t using strong authentication methods, making […]

Researchers examined Google Wallet and found a lot of customer information stored in plain text on mobile devices, making users vulnerable to social engineering attacks if malicious attackers gained access to the data. A high-level review of data transmitted and stored by Google Wallet shows that users can be at risk for financial or identity […]

Fake software is nothing new, as scammers try to trick users into buying fake antivirus and other security tools. Now Symantec researchers have uncovered a scam around a fake smartphone monitoring tool. SMS Privato Spy is marketed as a tool that allows users to view a smartphone’s screen live, activate the microphone and eavesdrop on […]

A malicious developer cloned popular games on the Android Market and rereleased them as free apps after modifying some code. Google has removed those apps, according to Lookout Security. The developer created at least a dozen copies of the most popular games, adding code to make the phone send SMS messages to premium rate numbers. […]

Adobe released a patch addressing vulnerabilities in its ColdFusion Web application development platform. However, it still has not released a fix for the critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that the company promised last week. The vulnerability exists in ColdFusion versions 9.01, 9.0, 8.0.1 and 8.0 running on Windows, Mac OS X and Unix, […]

The FBI has denied a request for information on how the nation’s topmost law enforcement agency is using Carrier IQ’s mobile diagnostic and monitoring software. Michael Morisy of Muckrock News filed on Dec. 1 a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for “manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered […]

Microsoft released 13 security bulletins to fix 17 different vulnerabilities as part of its December Patch Tuesday update, according to the advisory released Dec. 8. Three bulletins were marked critical and the remaining 10 were rated important. “December’s patch is a mixed bag of treats,” Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security, told […]