Larry Barrett

Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report will now include statistics, prosecution tips and advisories culled from the U.S. Secret Service department’s computer crimes investigations, company officials said this week. Company officials said the inclusion of the Secret Service data will help enterprise clients extradite and prosecute cyber thieves based overseas and identify emerging trends and […]

It may seem overly strict for companies to actually lock down the USB ports on their PCs, but this story will make it seem logical. More than 24,000 records from a Kentucky mental hospital went AWOL when a flash drive containing the records disappeared. These records held all kinds of patient data, probably not the […]

From IBM, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce to thousands of startups, just about every business software company of note has a cloud computing offering or has one in the works. But enterprises with big investments in more traditional on-premise solutions aren’t about to dump their software infrastructure and start over. If, as many believe, the future […]

For the past couple years, IT shops have been putting off system upgrades and infrastructure overhauls as they tightened their belts amid the worsening recession. But those lean days could be coming to an end, according to a new survey polling CEOs and CIOs at an array of enterprise software firms. The poll, conducted by […]

McAfee capped off what’s has already been one of the worst weeks in the security software company’s history by reporting first-quarter sales and earnings that fell well short of analysts’ estimates. Not surprisingly, McAfee (NYSE: MFE) shares were punished in after-hours trading, falling $3.78 a share, or 10 percent, to $35.75 after closing off $0.39 […]

Spam accounts for more than 90 percent of all e-mails sent every second of every minute around the world and, according to security software vendor Sophos, enterprising hackers from every corner of the world are getting in on the action. What may be surprising to some people is that China has actually decreased its spam […]

Symantec executives have seen the writing on the wall and realize that the future of security software isn’t so much building firewalls and other instruments to protect data from the outside but rather to secure the data from within with leading-edge encryption technology so that it can be shared and stored anywhere without it falling […]

Back in the good old days—defined in this case as circa 2006—hackers actually had to be fairly bright and possess decent programming skills to wreak any kind of meaningful havoc online. Now, thanks to the proliferation of cheap and easy-to-use Web-based malware kits, just about anyone can hang a Black Hat shingle and try to […]

U.S.-based companies spend more time and money resolving high-profile customer data breaches than their counterparts around the globe, according to the latest survey conducted by independent security researcher The Ponemon Institute and security software vendor PGP Corp. The reason is simple: unlike many foreign countries, U.S. companies are required to immediately notify consumers when a […]

McAfee’s had better weeks. One of the largest antivirus software vendors committed the cardinal sin last week of pushing out a software update that somehow listed a key component of the Windows XP operating system as a threat, causing thousands of machines to shutdown and reboot themselves over and over again. The mix-up showcased what […]

Even after so many countless lost laptops resulted in compromised data, including a lost medical laptop earlier this month, a Massachusetts medical center has been left red-faced after a lost laptop compromised the personal and medical information of 3,500 patients. Incidents like this are expensive for all parties involved, and despite laptop vendors offering all […]

A new report finds that small and midsized businesses are often unready, unwilling or unable to cope with the massive risk posed by cyber attacks and data breaches. That’s according to Panda Security, which found that SMBs often lack the tools and know-how necessary to effectively combat hackers and data thieves. That puts not just […]