Security

According to news agencies, Kaspersky Antivirus founder Eugene Kaspersky's son has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom in Russia. Unconfirmed reports, including a bulletin from BBC News, state that 20-year-old Ivan Kaspersky was nabbed while ... on his way to work. Eugene Kaspersky is the founder of Moscow-based security company Kaspersky Labs, a world leader in software designed to protect PCs from viruses and malware. The firm says its products are currently being used by more than 300 million people around the world, making it the third-largest security software company in the world. ... (view more)

According to a recent report, the number of records compromised by data breaches fell dramatically in 2010. While that makes for welcome news, the number of actual breaches was much, much higher last year than in 2009. The figures come from ... Verizon's business department, which carries out investigations into security breaches as a commercial service. Unlike its figures for 2009, the company included details of some cases provided by the US Secret Service for the first time in 2010. That makes a direct comparison very tricky, though it turns out the overall trends are clear. Three Times More ... (view more)

A computer programmer will spend two years behind bars after bringing down several high-profile websites. But unlike most modern hackers, Bruce Raisley was motivated by embarrassment rather than greed. Raisley had formerly worked for an online ... vigilante group known as Perverted Justice, which has members pose as youngsters online in order to catch and expose adults seeking an illicit meeting. The group works with television show To Catch A Predator. Eventually, Raisley quit the group following an argument with its founder, Xavier Von Erck, who then carried out a quite spectacular and ironic ... (view more)

Toshiba has announced the successful completion of the first set of self-encrypting hard disk drives (HDDs) in the world. The popular Japanese consumer electronics firm has engineered these HDDs to automatically invalidate confidential data when ... connected to an unknown host. The 2.5-type MK6461GSYG family of hard disk drives is featured in five different models, ranging from 160GB to 640GB. All models allow the original manufacturers to configure different data invalidation options. Their main purpose in doing so is to assist IT departments in helping their companies comply with ever-changing ... (view more)

Do you feel safe using Facebook? Given the social networking site's incredible growth in previous years, it would appear most people do. But one prominent security company says the site should do a whole lot more to protect its millions of users, ... and has made three major suggestions for beefing up Facebook's privacy shields. The suggestions include: Introduce major adjustments to the default privacy settings so that user data cannot be shared in any circumstance unless they give express consent. (Right now, people have to seek out and adjust these settings to keep people from snooping ... (view more)

The FBI and Justice Department have shut down a network of infected Windows machines used for stealing money. The 'Coreflood' botnet was one of the largest and most longstanding networks of its type. Despite the network shutdown, the malicious ... software used to infect PCs remains in the wild. Over 2 Million PCs Infected with Malicious Software The botnet at one point held control over two million PCs which were infected by malicious software, often downloaded unknowingly by users online the Internet. The malicious software (also known as "malware") easily penetrated Windows defenses ... (view more)

Windows users are being targeted by a new scam that extorts money through long-distance telephone calls, racking up heavy charges. After a victim mistakenly downloads and installs a Trojan onto their PC, the following message is displayed on a ... Windows PC: "This copy of Windows is locked. You may be a victim of fraud or there may be an internal error". While similar messages have appeared before and related to scareware and ransomware scams, the fact that the Windows operating system will not reboot (either in normal mode or safe mode) adds validity to the alleged crisis situation. Victims ... (view more)

Microsoft has announced that Tuesday's security update will include patches for a record-breaking 64 security problems. They include fixes for a number of particularly high profile problems announced in the past couple of months. The update will be ... made up of 17 bulletins. That ties for the record, though this will be a new highest figure for the number of individual fixes. One of the bugs that's being fixed involved a bug in the Windows Server Message Block ("SMB"), the system that controls networking and file-sharing. The bug was disclosed in February and could theoretically have ... (view more)

Prepare to get your terrorism reports dished out via social networking sites very soon. The United States government says it's considering using Twitter and Facebook to announce changes in the terror-alert system, replacing the old color-coded ... ratings ranging from "Low" to "Guarded" all the way up to "High" and "Severe". Warning System Could Start This Month The report doesn't come to us from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but instead the Associated Press, which says it recently learned DHS is considering April 27 as a start date for the new program. The Facebook and Twitter ... (view more)

A leading security firm says targeting personal data is becoming less of a priority for online criminals. Instead, there's now a greater effort to unlawfully access corporate data, including trade secrets. Word of this new trend comes to us courtesy ... of a McAfee report based on a survey of around 1,000 IT managers in seven countries. Only 1/3 Of Companies Publicly Admit Data Breach Perhaps the most dramatic finding was that previous estimates of data breaches may have been much lower than was reality, as just 30 per cent of companies questioned said they always make breaches public. Around 60 ... (view more)