Ryan Naraine

An audit of the Department of Homeland Securitys system controls for remote access has found an alarming absence of configuration guidelines and several unpatched software products that put the DHS at risk of malicious hacker attacks. In a report made public this week, the Office of Inspector General in the DHS warned that the audit […]

Microsoft Corp. has bought into the anti-spyware business. Just two months after Chairman Bill Gates dropped a strong hint that Microsoft planned to do something about the spyware scourge, the Redmond, Wash., company announced the acquisition of Giant Company Software, a New York-based startup with a highly rated anti-spyware application. Financial terms of the purchase […]

Microsofts sudden acquisition of highly rated anti-spyware startup Giant Company Software has set the cat among the pigeons. As competitors rush to spin the news as a “validation” of the nascent anti-spyware sector, analysts predict that Redmond is working on an enterprise-class product combining spyware- and virus-fighting capabilities. “We believe Microsoft will come out with […]

A new virus strain masquerading as electronic Christmas cards is accounting for one in every 10 e-mails hitting in-boxes, security experts warned Wednesday. The W32/Zafi-D worm, which originated in Hungary, is using mass-mailing and P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques to squirm through in-boxes and slow network traffic to a crawl. The worm, which poses as a Christmas […]

Looking to cement its place as a legitimate contender in the enterprise anti-spyware space, Webroot Software Inc. has beefed up its Spy Sweeper Enterprise product with new features to handle bandwidth conservation and mobile client updates. With Spy Sweeper Enterprise 2.0, the Boulder, Colo.-based Webroot is reaching out to high-end corporate clients with new features […]

Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for five vulnerabilities in Windows products, including a patch for a known security issue in the WINS (Windows Internet Name Service) name server. As expected, the company released five advisories with “important” severity ratings but warned that four of the five could lead to code execution attacks. Microsoft typically rates […]

The American Chemical Society has fired off a lawsuit against Google Inc., accusing the Web search powerhouse of “trademark infringement and unfair competition” with its Google Scholar search beta. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, accuses Google of violating the Societys trademarks used in a similar search tool […]

Four days after an internal error caused the accidental purging of legitimate IM accounts, America Online Inc. began recovering Monday to restore access to thousands of affected users. The companys technicians have successfully restored the majority of affected AIM accounts, including buddy lists, buddy icons, and other saved preferences. “As of today, all AIM screen […]

Anti-virus vendors have raised the alarm for a new mass-mailing worm with a dangerous backdoor component. The worm, called W32.Maslan.C@mm, arrives as an attachment promising naked photos of Playboy models but, if executed, drops an IRC (Inter Relay Chat) bot capable of transmitting passwords and sensitive information back to the virus writer. According to an […]

America Online Inc. has confirmed that it mistakenly deactivated a number of AOL Instant Messenger accounts this week as part of its regular cycle of opening unused screen names to new users. AOL, whose instant messaging service is among the most widely used worldwide, had begun releasing screen names that had gone unused when it […]