security

If Fujitsu seems obsessed with the human palm, there's good reason: The company sees it as a key to the future. After experimenting with various forms of its "PalmSecure" technology, the company has come up with a mouse that can double as a palm reader for computer and network security.

Fujitsu calls the device "the world's first mouse capable of scanning the pattern of veins in the user's hand," according to Gizmo Watch. The company claims that palm-reading sensors are easier to use than competing biometric mice that scan fingerprints. We hope they … Read more

Like worms that have attacked MSN Messenger, AOL IM and Yahoo Messenger in the recent past, a worm is currently attacking Skype IM users. From an infected machine, the virus known as either Ramex.a (Skype) or Pykspa.a (McAfee) or Skipi.a shoots messages with a live link to people on the infected machine's Skype contact list. A JPEG image within the message provides a download link to a file with the SCR extension. Recipients who click on the link are then infected.

Once installed, the worm injects bogus entries into the computer's HOSTS file so that … Read more

Over the past few years, the security industry has been a hotbed of M&A activity. The big guys swallow the small guys and independent technologies become part of integrated suites or anchor products. We saw this with identity management, e-mail security, SSL VPNs, security event management, etc.

My prediction is that we will soon see a repeat of this cycle and this time the buyout activity will center on database security tools.

Why database security? To quote the famous bank robber Willie Sutton, "because that's where the money is." Databases contain loads of private, confidential, … Read more

For several weeks starting in early August, visitors to MySpace, Photobucket, Bebo and other high-traffic Web sites were exposed to banner ads that contained Trojan horse software that could wreak havoc on a computer.

Web security company ScanSafe tracked the malicious ads back to Yahoo's Right Media network and estimates that they ran several million times, according to The Washington Post's Security Fix news site.

"All a visitor to one of these sites needed to do to infect their machines was to browse a page that featured the ads with a version of Internet Explorer that was … Read more

Microsoft on Tuesday released its September 2007 security bulletin, which includes four updates: One is designated as "critical" by the software giant; three are deemed "important," and one previously announced patch was dropped. Microsoft decided at the last minute not to patch Sharepoint Server in this month's release. The most serious patch affects Microsoft Agent in Windows 2000. Of the important patches, one affects Windows Services for UNIX, one affects Visual Studio and one affects both MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

All Microsoft security patches for Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update … Read more

Excluding Firefox and its 400 million downloads and 120 million regular users, the days of a killer free application dominating hearts and minds are deader than Pets.com. Yet a single malware destroyer is what we're all hoping for, especially since malware and virus threats are as chameleonic as their intentions are devious.

Three antimalware applications have made it to the top of my list: Avira Antivir, AVG Anti-Spyware, and A-Squared Free.

… Read more

A Democratic-backed contingent in Congress is still hoping to enact a requirement that all electronic voting machines used in next fall's presidential elections produce voter-verified paper trails, but a bumpy road lies ahead.

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Rules met on Wednesday to begin discussing H.R. 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, but never reached an agreement on how to proceed with the bill. They were supposed to meet again on Friday morning, setting the stage for a vote as early as Monday, but that meeting was canceled.

As Congressional Quarterly reports, … Read more

What good are several million Storm worm infected PCs? According to one researcher, the current computing power of Storm worm's botnet is greater than IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. "If you calculate pure theoretical throughput," Matt Sergeant, chief antispam technologist with security vendor MessageLabs, "then I'm sure the botnet has more capacity than IBM's Blue Gene. If you sat them down to play chess, the botnet would win."

The Australian publication IT News also quotes Sergeant as saying, "In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away." He goes … Read more

Top Democrats on a congressional Homeland Security Committee have formally asked the Bush administration to place a "moratorium" on new plans to make detailed satellite images available to a wider range of government agencies.

The move, in the form of letter released Thursday evening, arrived after a lengthy hearing about the topic on earlier that day.

In the letter, House of Representatives' Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and subcommittee chairpeople Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Christopher Carney (D-Pa.) said the day's testimony from Department of Homeland Security officials and the planned program's head, Charles Allen, &… Read more