Security

Fri, September 03, 2010 - Hewlett-Packard swooped in with the better bid to overtake Dell and win 3Par, so now we can all sit back and wait for the next acquisition battle to roll around. Meanwhile, Apple debuted updated iPods and Apple TV to entertain us, among other IT news stories of the week.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - A critical bug in QuickTime was reported to Apple two months before a second researcher independently revealed the vulnerability this week, the director of a bug bounty program said Friday.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - Federal prosecutors this week charged nine former Sprint employees with fraud and aggravated identity theft after learning they had cloned customer cell phone numbers to make $15 million worth of calls. According to the complaint from federal prosecutors, the individuals who have been charged worked at Sprint stores in the Bronx, Bergen, N.J., and Tampa, Fla., and used company computers to get confidential information about thousands of customers. The data was used to create the so-called 'clone' cell phones. Of the $15 million worth of calls, a large percentage of them were international calls, said prosecutors.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - Apple's music-focused social network, Ping is only a few days old, and already the iTunes-based feature is "drowning in scams and spams," security researchers say. The scams are nothing too advanced at the moment, and there are no reports of clickjacking worms or other forms of aggressive malware, experts say. But if you're looking for links to bogus surveys promising free iPhones, iPads and other assorted iDevices then Ping in iTunes 10 is the social network for you.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - Consumer Watchdog, a group that has been a sharp critic of Google's privacy practices in the past, is at it once again.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - Secunia has updated its Personal Software Inspector (PSI) with the ability to silently download and apply patches from multiple vendors soon after their release. PSI 2.0 is now available in an open beta test,

Fri, September 03, 2010 - Organizers of a recent Defcon social engineering contest will release their results next week. One conclusion is that women did well in protecting corporate secrets.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - A clever spammer found a glitch in Facebook's photo upload system and used it to post thousands of unwanted Wall messages this week.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - A school district in South Hadley, Massachusetts, is hoping a specialized software application will help stop tragedies like the one that befell Phoebe Prince, an Irish-born teen who committed suicide in January after an alleged bullying campaign by fellow students.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - A Nigerian advance-fee scammer, Okpako Diamreyan, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison by a federal judge.

Fri, September 03, 2010 - A widely used program for Web spidering can be hijacked for malicious purposes

Fri, September 03, 2010 - Germany will soon launch a service to help consumers remove malicious software from their computers in an attempt to stem the spread of spam-sending botnets.

Thu, September 02, 2010 - Confidela's WatchDox is adding support for mobile platforms, starting with Android 2.2. Users can access selected, protected documents. But they can be restricted in being able to forward, print, or copy them. It uses an encrypted version of Flash to display documents, but a native version is being tested now for iOS devices like the iPhone.

Thu, September 02, 2010 - An information security company will soon release a tool that will allow companies to test their ERP (enterprise resource planning) software for security threats.