Security

The rise of online video sites could cause major problems for the Internet as a whole, according to researchers. The amount of traffic on the web is increasing much quicker than its capacity. Brett Swanson of the Discover Institute says this is most ... likely to affect the 'edges' of the Internet, the final mile or so of cabling between telephone exchanges and peoples homes. He has coined the phrase 'exaflood', which refers to an exabyte, or one thousand million gigabytes of date. Until recently, an exabyte had simply been a mathematical concept, but Cisco estimates total Internet traffic will ... (view more)

Scared about holiday spam and spyware messages? Although it's some ways off, Symantec is now just a few weeks away from shipping a test edition of its next significant update to the Norton 360 security/backup formula. The finished product is ... expected to wrap up early this spring, shipping by the time March wraps up. So, what's under the hood of this new Norton 360 (for now dubbed 'version 2.0)? Preventative measures against Internet hackers and identity thieves A "Smart Firewall" that reportedly uses behavior-based methods to weed out incoming threats New software that can be used to back up ... (view more)

Updates are supposed to help us, aren't they? Not always. In this case, a recent security update from Microsoft has completely blocked a number of users from accessing the web with the company's own browser, Internet Explorer. For those who are ... reading this in Explorer after downloading update MS07-069, consider yourselves lucky. The bulletin was released December 11th, and since that time users have been flooding Microsoft's support forums with complaints that they can no longer regularly connect to the Internet. In some cases, the browser shuts down about 50-60% of the time, displaying an ... (view more)

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has issued an hp.com warning regarding a gaping security hole that affects 82 laptop models running Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. According to reports from the company, the 'backdoor' could put users at risk for ... drive-by code execution attacks. (Source: zdnet.com ) The 82 laptop models are listed in the advisory from HP as open to the ActiveX vulnerability found on the HP Info Center software. A roadmap for exploiting the vulnerability is making rounds on the Internet. HP has rated the issue as "critical." To run the exploit, all the laptop owner has to to ... (view more)

Somewhat contrary to a report from eweek.com regarding the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Team's claim that Microsoft Vista is far more secure than Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X, Microsoft has released a 47-page microsoft.com detailing Vista ... Service Pack 1 (SP1) which describes more than 300 hot fixes covering everything from data protection to video performance. (Source: informationweek.com ) Microsoft says the 47-page document is not exhaustive since they plan to add more fixes and patches to the final version of Vista SP1 before it's released to the public early next year. Among the ... (view more)

Security experts have found a way to intercept information from Microsoft's wireless keyboards, and warn that other brands could also be at risk. The affected keyboards don't use the popular Bluetooth technology, but instead broadcast on a very ... short radio frequency. Most surprisingly, the encryption appears to be shockingly weak. It turns out that much only the keystrokes themselves are encrypted, not any of the background information such as that used to synchronise the keyboard and computer. Shockingly, the same encryption key (the code needed to decipher the data) is used for the entire ... (view more)

It seems not even the tough, intimidating reputation of the U.S. military is enough to scare away hackers. According to recent reports, two major American military science labs have been infiltrated by what may have been a rival government. The ... break-in was announced this past weekend by the ORNL, or Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Also hacked was the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Nex Mexico. A spokesperson for Oak Ridge described the hack as a "sophisticated cyber attack," one that led to the unauthorized use of a database containing private details for visitors between 1990 ... (view more)

Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, have dismissed a Microsoft study claiming Internet Explorer has fewer security problems. The study was produced by Jeff Jones, a Microsoft security researcher. He compared the publicly-announced ... problems of both new and old versions of both browsers. His figures say that in the past three years, Internet Explorer has had 87 'vulnerabilities' (potential security problems that need fixing), while Firefox has had 199. He also found that Microsoft was improving security at a quicker pace; looking at vulnerabilities for each version of a browser in ... (view more)

Though it has struggled to gain the attention of many computer users set in their XP ways, Windows Vista is considered to be relatively safer from malware than its predecessor. Unfortunately, according to one prominent security company, that's about ... to change. In a recent report by well-known software developer McAfee Inc., Vista is labeled as a targeted system for calendar 2008. That will certainly change the current state of affairs, where hackers have bypassed the new Vista in continuing to attack old XP users. "Most of the current malware has ignored Vista," admitted McAfee researcher ... (view more)

The Cold War ended almost twenty years ago. After decades of tension between the two nuclear superpowers, the Russian people opted for democracy and economic change, taking a much different political stance than dictators like Stalin and Krushchev. ... Now, it seems something else is ready to replace the Soviets in threatening American -- and global -- national security. Some analysts now fear that the world is about to be crushed within the icy grasp of a "cyber cold war". The frightening concept comes after prominent security company McAfee released their annual report last week. According to ... (view more)