Criminal syndicates and drug cartels are building large-scale software pirating operations and selling that software – which is likely to contain malware – to fund their operations, warned David Finn, associate general counsel at Microsoft.

Hackers exploited close to twice as many vulnerabilities as usual in January, half of those being “critical”, according to Fortinet’s monthly threat landscape report.

The Federal Trade Commission is requiring three credit report resellers to strengthen their data security procedures and submit independent audits every other year for 20 years as part of a settlement with the agency.

Next week’s patch Tuesday will, says Lumension, lead to 900 million reboots of Windows machines around the world. Sadly, whilst this sounds a rather large power-draining volume of unnecessary PC actions, the reality is that it’s not that abnormal.

It looks as though Adobe’s new Reader X incorporates a number of security features that block exploits that cybercriminals have tapped in previous Reader viewer applications. Sophos is reporting that its research team has tested the viewer and found th…

The N-DEx search engine, which the FBI revealed back in 2008 as a means for US law enforcement agencies to carry out Google-style searches on multi-agency databases, is about to go live in the US.

Reports are coming in that the Egyptian government is using elements of the emergency national broadcast network to pipe tens of thousands of pro-Mubarak text messages on the network of Vodafone Egypt.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued the final version of its recommendations for securely configuring and using full virtualization technologies, which allow multiple operating systems to run on a single platform.

A white paper just published by Corsaire claims to show that multiple authenticators – such as PIN codes with security questions – are still not enough to protect private data.

Trusteer says that its research into the Zeus malware and botnet command and control (C&C) servers that control the swarms of infected internet users shows Russian and US top level domains are now the main home of C&C infestations.