Paul F. Roberts

Enterprise IT managers who are still knee-deep in patches from Oracle Corp.s last quarterly Critical Patch Update have more to worry about after an unknown individual last week posted on a security discussion list source code for a worm that spreads among Oracle databases. The worm is the first ever developed for an Oracle platform […]

Symantec Corp.s ascension to the top of the security world may have peaked and begun a long descent last week when the company reported a huge quarterly loss as well as the departure of another top executive. Symantec lost $251 million in the second quarter of its fiscal year, its first loss in nearly three […]

Michael Lynn, the security researcher who made international headlines in July for blowing the whistle about a major hole in Cisco Systems Inc.s software, has found employment at Ciscos chief rival, Juniper Networks Inc. A Juniper spokesman confirmed that Lynn works for the Sunnyvale, California, networking equipment maker, three months after he lost his job […]

Botnets are big business—at least according to authorities who announced the first U.S. case against an alleged computer hacker, who authorities believe netted $60,000 in cash and a BMW from a personal army of zombie computers. Federal authorities arrested a 20-year-old California man Thursday and charged him with running a network of 400,000 compromised computers […]

An equipment failure knocked out access to the Google search engine for Internet users on the West Coast of the United States early Thursday, a company spokesperson confirmed. Sporadic outages began around midnight Wednesday, Pacific time, and were the result of a piece of malfunctioning network hardware. The disruptions affected a “small fraction” of Google […]

Those frustrated with the mainstream medias coverage of the Iraq War have a new source of information on the conflict: raw video footage from the conflict released under an open-source “Creative Commons” license. Video footage from the Alive in Baghdad project has been released on video blogging site blip.tv. The video segments include the aftermath […]

New digital rights management technology shipping on music CDs by Sony Corp. of America/Bertelsmann AG artists employs stealthy, rootkit-style techniques to hide from users, according to a security expert. The new technology, which Sony has dubbed “sterile burning,” manipulates the Windows core processing center, or “kernel,” to make the DRM almost totally undetectable on Windows […]

For critics of Microsoft Corp.s software, 2003 was a very good year. The appearance of the Slammer and Blaster worms was evidence—if any were necessary—that things had gone badly awry at the Redmond, Wash., software giant. In articles over the days and weeks that followed, security experts and even the companys customers took Microsoft to […]

Microsoft Corp. is spending time and money—lots of it—courting people such as Tom Ferris, an independent security researcher who runs the Web site Security-Protocols.com. And for good reason. Ferris, who uses the online name “badpack3t,” has discovered a number of serious holes in the Redmond, Wash., companys products in recent months. These holes include vulnerabilities […]

Sana Security Inc. will release a desktop product next month that uses the companys behavioral malicious-code detection technology to find and remove spyware, keyloggers and other programs. Primary Response SafeConnect will complement the companys HIPS (host intrusion prevention system) product, Primary Response, on desktop systems and unmanaged network devices, company officials said. The new malware […]