Larry Barrett

McAfee has some sobering statistics for small and midsized businesses that are increasingly under attack from hackers at the same time they’re downsizing their security and IT departments to cut costs. On Wednesday, the security software vendor release a report, titled “The Security Paradox”, that found the average midsized company lost $43,000 to security breaches […]

SAP (NYSE: SAP) on Wednesday had only mixed news for investors hoping for a positive sign in its third-quarter results: While income totaled $644 million — up 12 percent from last year — sales saw a steep drop and the company slashed its outlook for the remainder of the year. During the quarter, SAP said […]

Amazon Web Services unveiled the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) today, a Web-based service that helps customers set up, operate and augment relational databases in the cloud. As corporate customers are increasingly turning to cloud-based applications for storage, security and a variety of business applications, this aggregated content requires a degree of database sophistication that’s […]

Symantec on Tuesday said its Data Loss Prevention 10 release, available in December, will allow enterprise customers to apply encryption and enterprise rights management applications to sensitive content in their networks. The security software suite takes data loss protection (DLP) and recovery in a little different direction by virtue of a new remediation platform that […]

A laptop stolen in August from an employee’s vehicle parked at a Dayton Beach, Fla. Medical center exposed more than 33,000 patients’ personal and medical data, according to hospital officials. Halifax Health officials last week began sending out letters to the roughly 33,000 people who may have had their data exposed in the theft, advising […]

If it’s in the headlines, it’ll probably wind up as spam. That’s the word from McAfee Labs this week as researchers at the security software firm reported that two of the biggest stories this week, the so-called “Balloon Boy” and the imminent release of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, are also the most popular search […]

As if Detroit doesn’t enough problems, a new study by Panda Security found that the automotive industry and its employees are targeted with more spam and malware-laden e-mails than any other sector. The three-month study conducted by the cloud-based security software firm from July to September analyzed more than 503 million messages sent to 867 […]

Only 16 percent of enterprise workloads are running on virtual machines today, according to Gartner analyst Tom Bittman, but that’s about to change in a big way, with small- and mid-sized businesses leading the charge. Bittman debunked some of the biggest virtualization myths during his presentation Tuesday at Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando, Fla. At […]

ChoicePoint, one of the nation’s largest data brokers, agreed to pay $275,000 to redress consumers this week after the Federal Trade Commission said it failed to adequately safeguard one of its databases, an oversight that exposed the personal information of 13,750 people in 2008. In an FTC statement released Monday, the agency took ChoicePoint to […]

VMware (NYSE: VMW) delivered the goods in its third quarter Wednesday, posting a profit of $95 million, or $0.24 a share, on sales of $490 million — easily topping analyst estimates on both fronts — and upped its sales forecast for the rest of the year. Investors sounded their approval in after-hours trading, sending the […]

Sun Microsystems in an SEC filing Tuesday disclosed that it will lop off up to 3,000 jobs in the next 12 months as it and Oracle await the European Commission’s approval of their proposed $7.4 billion merger. Oracle’s (NASDAQ: ORCL) $7.4 billion purchase of the software and server company was given a thumbs-up from the […]

Which applications and strategies will lead IT spending into the new decade? Research firm Gartner offered its own take with the unveiling today of its Top 10 list of technologies and trends for 2010 a its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. Gartner defined a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact — […]