Against a background of the EU likely to water down its privacy proposals, and Harvard university secretly searching the emails of 16 resident deans, two major universities have published two very different papers on privacy in the internet age.

Tripwire, a Portland Ore security and compliance company, has announced a definitive agreement to acquire nCircle, a San Francisco risk and security performance management company.

So says an article in the latest issue of New Scientist, commenting on a report published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society last week. The key, apparently, is China’s implementation of Source Address Validation Architecture (SAVA).

Dovetailing with the ever-escalating glut of Android-based mobile malware, it turns out that a black market for Android developer accounts has sprung up. Google Play accounts are apparently going for $100 a pop in the cyber-underground.

A $5 million class-action suit brought against networking site LinkedIn concerning a significant June 2012 data breach has been dismissed after a US District Court judge ruled the breach as “abstract” rather than resulting in actual harm.

This month’s Patch Tuesday will include seven security bulletins from Microsoft: four are critical and three are important; three require reboots, three may require a reboot, and one does not. Both businesses and consumers will likely be affected.

The Department of Defense is pulling the plug on Cyber Fast Track, a program aimed at tapping reformed hackers and other security hotshots to solve cyber-defense problems quickly.

If there were any doubt that Android malware is becoming an epidemic, look no further than a study showing that the number of new malware programs for the mobile operating system has increased five-fold since the first half of 2012. PC threats, meanwhi…

The information security community must stop giving away the roadmap to its defense, said Art Gilliland, HP, at the RSA conference in San Francisco, February 28 2013.