Richard Adhikari

A possibly racist text message sent to the cell phones of 42,000 students and faculty of the University of Florida at Gainesville, Fla., has sparked widespread anger. “The monkey got out of the cage,” the message said. Angry recipients filed complaints with campus police and university authorities. The message was sent out Tuesday night. The […]

For the second time in a month, a payment processor has reported being hit by data thieves. This time, the victim is Heartland Payment Systems, one of the five largest payment processors in the United States. Heartland (NYSE: HYP) has not disclosed how many people were affected by the security breach, which it said may […]

Companies rushing to virtualize their environments in order to cut costs will find that backup and restore could be a problem due to its extensive use of scripting. Most businesses use VMware products, as the company is the market leader, and its VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) centralized backup facility requires users to write a lot […]

Photo credit: Reuters As the nation prepares for tomorrow’s historic inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, antivirus vendors are gearing up for a flood of spam and malware-laden Web sites that aim to capitalize on the event. Malware authors have long been eager to leverage interest in current events, most recently the fighting in Gaza. Last […]

Enterprises virtualizing their infrastructure to help cut costs could be in for a shock — system performance may be degraded and they may not save as much money as they had hoped, unless they manage the performance of their business-critical applications. But that management is difficult because of a lack of tools that enable companies […]

For the second time in four months, a State Department employee has pleaded guilty to accessing the personal information of citizens in the department’s passport records without proper authorization. According to the Department of Justice, Dwayne F. Cross, 41, of Upper Marlboro, Md., pleaded guilty before Judge John M. Facciola in U.S. District Court for […]

The booming popularity of virtualization, cloud computing and other new technologies may prove too tempting for malware authors to resist — and could prompt a wave of attacks in 2009, according to security vendor AppRiver. Businesses may be especially at risk because they’re looking to such technology to help them cut costs during the recession, […]

As if zombie PCs — computers taken over by hackers and used to distribute spam and malware — weren’t already bad enough, they are now harder to prevent than ever before. That’s because they’re getting smarter and harder to track down, according to security software vendor Commtouch. New zombies now routinely request new IP addresses […]

The arraignment of Terry Childs, the rogue system administrator for San Francisco who gained notoriety after locking officials out of the city’s fiber-optic wide area network (WAN) last year, has been postponed while lawyers work out what he’s actually charged with. Judge Charles Haines granted a request from Childs’ lawyer, Richard Shikman, to delay entering […]

On the heels of the release yesterday of information about the top 25 programming errors that lead to Web security problems like SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting, InternetNews.com has learned that the state of New York plans to implement procurement contracts that include language demanding application security. That language was co-developed by Will Pelgrin, […]

Czech antivirus company Grisoft, better known as AVG, has bought identity theft prevention software vendor Sana Security. The purchase adds behavior-based protection to its capabilities and will better protect users as they surf the Web, J.R. Smith, CEO of AVG, told InternetNews.com. Details of the purchase were not disclosed. The purchase comes as the recession […]

In the wake of fears that cybercrime will shoot up this year and calls to the incoming Obama administration to beef up cyber security, more than 30 U.S. and international cyber security organizations today released a list of the leading programming errors that impact security on the Web. The effort was jointly coordinated by MITRE, […]