Security Breaking News

Virtualizing network security
Enterprise network managers are looking to virtualize more data center resources, but they hesitate when it comes to security. They want the resource sharing and hardware consolidation that virtualization offers but aren't willing to risk compromising security. More..

DeviceLock counters USB stick menace with alliance
Endpoint security vendor DeviceLock continues to seek partners in order to counter the growing use of removable storage devices - such as memory sticks - in the removal of sensitive information from corporate networks. More..

Android puts out call to mobile security gurus
Developers of Android, the Linux mobile platform spearheaded by Google, are asking security experts for input. More..

Online encyclopedia lists internal network security threats
A free online encyclopedia of internal network security issues was released Tuesday by network security provider Promisec, which includes popular Web-based applications among possible data-loss threats. More..

Gag order against MIT students gets another day in court
A federal judge in Boston will decide on Tuesday whether to extend or let expire a restraining order enjoining three students at MIT from publicly speaking about security flaws they discovered in the electronic fare-payment system used by the city's mass transit agency. More..

Aussie security company set to be bought by Symantec
Symantec has announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Australian security vendor PC Tools. The privately held PC Tools, which is headquartered in Sydney, has risen to global prominence since hitting the world stage in 2003 with its security and privacy products for Windows-based PCs. More..

Security firm warns against Olympic spam
Beware of e-mails with sensational Olympic subject titles. They will likely contain a form of malware called Storm that infects computer systems, according to enterprise security firm, Secure Computing. More..

Judge disolves gag order against MIT students
A U.S. District Court judge on Tuesday dissolved a gag order against a trio of MIT students who said they found flaws in the Massachusetts transit authority's ticketing system. More..

Judge dissolves gag order against MIT students
A U.S. District court judge on Tuesday dissolved a gag order against a trio of MIT students who say they found flaws in the Massachusetts transit authority's ticketing system. More..

Report: Princeton Review publishes sensitive data online
The Princeton Review is the latest company hit with a data breach that is making headlines. The New York-based educational service and test preparation provider inadvertently exposed files on at least 100,000 students in Sarasota, Florida and Fairfax County, Virginia through its Web site. News of the breach was made public Tuesday morning by a report in the New York Times. More..

Mac, Windows clipboards poisoned by URL attacks
Infected Web ads are poisoning Mac and Windows users' clipboards with URLs, researchers said Tuesday, in a "very cunning" attack designed to trick people into visiting sites touting bogus security software. More..

IMCD Business Backup: Prepare for all ContingenZ's
Some years ago, I wrote about my friends and colleagues Michael Miora and Stephen Cobb's incident management planning and training program, then called IMCD. Now Michael and Stephen Cobb's brother, Michael Cobb, have updated the product and reduced the price all the way down to $99 per copy (10% of the original price). They have renamed this new version 3 as "IMCD Business Backup" to make it clearer that the software is an actual preparation and recovery tool, not just a planning tool. More..

802.1x-based NAC
A recent poll at a Gartner security conference indicates strong interest in 802.1x authentication that will feed into the network-based, identity driven model of NAC. More..

Encryption compliance still the Wild West
Encrypting data is becoming a requirement. How well you need to manage the keys that are used to encrypt the data is still open to debate. More..

Check Point goes virtual with VPN-1
Check Point is introducing a version of its VPN-1 software that runs on VMware ESX or ESXi to protect virtual machines from one another when they are running on a single piece of hardware. More..

Provisioning/deprovisioning problematic for a third of organizations
Every time we think we've finally gotten a handle on the user provisioning/deprovisioning issue something comes along to disabuse us of that notion. In this case it's the results of a survey of attendees at last spring's Directory Experts Conference (DEC) put on by NetPro. More..

Peer-to-peer client uTorrent fixes serious vulnerability
One of the most popular programs used by some to illegally share files under copyright has patched a serious software vulnerability. More..

Anti-Georgia spammers building new botnet
Hackers targeting Georgia in the midst of its conflict with Russia have started sending out a new batch of malicious spam messages, apparently with the aim of building a new botnet network of remote-controlled computers. More..

AOL phisher gets seven-year sentence
A West Haven, Conn., man has been sentenced to seven years in prison for masterminding a phishing scheme that targeted AOL users over a four-year period. More..

Torvalds: Fed up with the 'security circus'
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people. More..

Encryption bottleneck: Lessons from performance analysis
Your computer is running slowly. Guess you have to buy a faster processor, right? Not necessarily. You want strong encryption. Guess you have to increase the encryption keylength, right? Not necessarily. More..

ConSentry's LANShield gear has NAC
ConSentry makes switches that support NAC, and that is how the company hyped itself when it started out, but the gear does a lot more. More..

Patch Tuesday haul nets 11 fixes
Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday brought the largest haul of patches in quite some time and included another fix for the company's WSUS patch management tool for businesses. A previous fix in July didn't fix the initial problem entirely, so a second update was required. VMWare users also have a bevy of patches to install, particularly the users that woke up to inoperable servers Tuesday due to a software bug. And Nokia phone users beware, a bug in the Java implementation for the Nokia Series 40 phones could allow hackers to make calls and record converstations on an affected phone. More..

Republican National Convention venue gets network makeover
What does it take to convert a hockey arena into a site that can handle the technology demands of the Republican National Convention? Roughly 25 miles of cabling, for starters. More..

Hackers spoof MSNBC alerts in new twist on malware ruse
Hackers trying to plant malware on PCs have switched from touting CNN news in come-on messages to pushing breaking stories said to be from rival network MSNBC, security experts said today. More..