Richard Adhikari

Malicious hackers are continuing their attacks on social networking sites, with a new variant of the Koobface worm now spreading its assault on a new crop of the popular sites. Facebook has already been in Koobface’s crosshairs since last year. But now it’s widened its attack to include MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and MyYearbook, according to […]

Researchers are warning that YouTube users may be next at risk as malware authors look for ways to take advantage of some of the most popular social networking and content-sharing sites on the Web. In recent weeks, they’ve targeted social bookmarking site Digg, spreading malware by adding malicious links into innocuous-seeming comments or in the […]

How did classified data on Marine One, the U.S. presidential helicopter fleet, wind up on a computer in Iran? That’s the question that Department of Defense (DoD) officials and helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft are scrambling to figure out after a file containing data on the helicopters surfaced on Iranian computers in a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, […]

Companies are moving to virtualization to cut costs. But many do not manage or back up their virtual machines because they don’t have the tools or don’t know which tools to use. Some virtualization vendors want to change that. Take some of the recent offerings by the big boys in virtualization – VMware (NYSE: VMW), […]

As enterprises look to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to help cut costs, Microsoft is looking to strengthen its hand in the market, rolling out new hosted applications and greater access to existing cloud-based offerings at the CeBIT 2009 trade show in Hanover, Germany. For starters, Microsoft is expanding access to its (NASDAQ: MSFT)’s Business Productivity Online Suite, […]

Identity thefts soared in 2008, and now 2009 is shaping up to be another banner year for phishers, hackers and other ID thieves. According to a new report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), a nonprofit set up to support and educate consumers on identity theft, U.S. businesses and other organizations suffered 83 security […]

Pity the poor spammers — they’re being hit by the recession, too. After years of ignoring instant messaging (IM), spammers are returning to IM en masse as yet another way to make money, security researchers say. The result is “spim” — spam over IM. “The global economy is affecting everybody, including those who spim and […]

Although critics are savaging the Obama administration’s proposed budget over its unprecedented deficit spending, industry observers are hailing its plans to set aside $355 million for cybersecurity efforts. In its fiscal 2010 budget proposal, released today, the White House said it aims to put the money toward making government and private-sector network infrastructure more resilient […]

Amid increasing scrutiny over U.S. cybersecurity, experts from both the private and public sectors are pushing a set of recommendations they say are sorely needed to help shore up the nation’s defenses against data breaches. The resulting Consensus Audit Guidelines (CAG) map out requirements for security controls needed to protect IT installations in government and […]

Adobe’s Flash application is great for creating and watching rich multimedia applications, but it’s one of the applications security researchers fear most because it is highly vulnerable to hackers. The application has come under more intensive scrutiny recently after Adobe issued a patch for yet another vulnerability discovered earlier this week. “We’re spending a lot […]

Microsoft is taking steps to protect customers from attacks through a zero-day flaw in Microsoft Excel discovered earlier this week. The company released a new antivirus definition for its system security services Windows Live OneCare and Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner, and for its Forefront Client Security software for businesses. The update, 1.51.1105.0, targets the […]

Salesforce.com bucked the trend of revenue and income declines that have been seen in the tech sector this earnings season, posting net income that surpassed analyst expectations in this trying quarter. However, the company said the outlook for 2009 is not as rosy as this past year. For the fourth fiscal quarter ended January 31, […]