Prodded by incessant reports of small- to mid-sized business losing millions of dollars at the hands of organized cyber criminals, federal regulators may soon outline more stringent steps that commercial banks need to take to protect business customers from online… Read More »
Microsoft Corp. has a message for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 users: If you browse the Interwebs with Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8, take care to ignore any prompts that ask you to hit the F1 key on… Read More »
I’ve grown fascinated over the years with various efforts by Internet service providers to crack down on the menace from botnets, large groupings of hacked PCs that computer criminals remotely control for a variety of purposes, from spamming to hosting… Read More »
Microsoft’s lawyers this week engineered a pair of important takedowns, one laudable and the other highly-charged. The software giant orchestrated a legal sneak attack against the Web servers controlling the Waledac botnet, a major distributor of junk e-mail. In an unrelated and more controversial move, Redmond convinced an ISP to shutter a popular whistleblower Web site for hosting a Microsoft surveillance compliance document.
A New York marketing firm that as recently as two weeks ago was preparing to be acquired now is facing bankruptcy from a computer virus infection that cost the company more than $164,000. Karen McCarthy, owner of Merrick, N.Y. based… Read More »
A New Hampshire-based IT consultancy lost nearly $100,000 this month after thieves broke into the company’s bank accounts with the help of 10 co-conspirators across the United States. On Feb. 10, Hudson, N.H. based Cynxsure LLC received a voicemail message… Read More »
The online version of Technology Review today carries a story I wrote about a government funded research group that is preparing to release a new free tool designed to block “drive-by downloads,” attacks in which the mere act of visiting… Read More »
As a journalist who for almost ten years has sought to explain complex computer security topics to a broad audience, it’s sometimes difficult to be picky when major news publications over-hype an important security story or screw up tiny details:… Read More »
Microsoft confirmed today that the recent spate of Windows XP crashes and blue-screens experienced by people who installed this month’s batch of security updates were found mainly on systems that were already infected with a rootkit, a tool designed to… Read More »
Adobe is urging users of its PDF Reader and Acrobat software to install an update that fixes a couple of critical security holes in the products. The patches come amid news that booby-trapped PDF files were responsible for roughly 80 percent of the exploits detected in the 4th quarter of 2009.
