Fahmida Y. Rashid

Cyber-attackers were busy over the weekend, targeting Websites belonging to various governments and law-enforcement agencies around the world. Their efforts haven’t let up with the new week. Hacktivist collective Anonymous appeared to claim responsibility for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Website being down for a few hours Feb. 10. “CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous,” posted @YourAnonNews. […]

Less than two weeks after releasing Firefox version 10, Mozilla has updated its popular Web browser to close a security flaw. A critical security vulnerability has been fixed in Firefox 10.0.1, Mozilla wrote in its advisory Feb. 10. The serious use-after-free flaw was found in a component that is shared with other Mozilla products, including […]

Application whitelisting and security as a service will help enterprises protect their data as employees adopt cloud services and bring their own devices to work, according to a Gartner analyst. These issues are becoming even more important as the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend increases in popularity, thanks to devices such as Apple€™s iPhone. The explosion of […]

Attackers are increasingly using various tools to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks, according to Arbor Networks. While some attack tools capable of launching DDoS attacks have been publicized recently, most organizations are not even aware of the broad range of tools that have been developed in the last few years and are readily available to attackers, […]

A Congressman is considering a bill that would offer financial incentives to companies that invest in cyber-security. The proposal is starting a debate about whether tax breaks would actually improve security within enterprises. Tax breaks and liability protection may spur companies to improve cyber-security on their networks more than new regulations, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore) […]

Two different researchers have figured out ways to crack the PIN code used to secure Google Wallet, raising new questions about the safety of the payment system. Tech blog TheSmartphoneChamp described Feb. 10 how someone can bypass the PIN code on Google Wallet by just clearing data associated with the payment app from the smartphone’s […]

Even spammers are following the United States presidential elections and have their favorites among the Republican candidates. Bitdefender researchers analyzed 8 million pieces of spam received since January and found that Mitt Romney was associated with 45 percent of unsolicited messages that referenced a political figure, Bogdan Botezatu, a senior e-threat analyst at Bitdefender, wrote […]

Microsoft will fix 21 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, several versions of the Windows operating system, Microsoft Office, Sharepoint and Silverlight in its February Patch Tuesday release. Microsoft will release nine bulletins, four of which are rated “critical,” according to the security bulletin advance notification released Feb. 9. The critical updates will fix issues in Internet […]

After a certificate authority (CA) admitted to issuing a digital certificate that was used to monitor employees’ encrypted communications, Mozilla is being asked to revoke that CA as a trusted root. In the past, Trustwave issued a subordinate root certificate to a private company that allowed the owner to “transparently manage” employees’ encrypted Web traffic. […]

When it comes to distributed denial-of-service attacks, smaller attacks can cause just as much, if not more, damage than enormous ones, according to a recent study. DDoS attackers are focusing less on bandwidth and shifting toward application layer attacks, Radware said in its “2011 Global Application and Network Security Report,” released Feb. 6. While some […]