Stories about: Carnegie Mellon University

Think you can guess the No. 1 threat to the security of your stored data? If you said hackers, or even trouble-making insiders, you'd be wrong. While malicious threats are an ongoing concern, it's your well-meaning employees who are more likely to unknowingly expose your company's stored data through, say, a file-sharing network or a misplaced laptop.

CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work.

Carnegie Mellon University has launched a massive upgrade of its campus-wide wireless LAN and chosen two WLAN vendors to supply the 802.11n infrastructure for it.

The world's first large-scale 802.11n wireless LAN is now operational. And students using the network at the small, rural New York state college where the wireless technology is deployed say they see a dramatic difference in what they can do with it, along with a more reliable WLAN connection.

Those who commit cybercrime know they need to stay on the cutting edge of technology to come up with new and different ways to swindle people. Luckily, the good guys are also spending time in research labs developing ways to thwart the latest tricks employed by spammers, phishers and other criminals.

We often hear corporate IT pros complain that justifying security expenses is tough because they don't necessarily generate revenue or enable new business opportunities. In fact, figuring out the economics of IT security is so challenging for customers and vendors that lots of the world's best researchers are putting their minds to the task.

The Department of Justice and FBI Wednesday said ongoing investigations have identified more than 1 million botnet crime victims.

Insecurely written software still looms as one of the greatest threats to Internet commerce, and user-generated Web content is becoming a vast new vulnerability hackers want to exploit, according to experts at RSA Conference.

Last February at Purdue University, a student taking "cs390s - Secure Computing" told his professor, Dr. Pascal Meunier, that a Web application he used for his physics class seemed to contain a serious vulnerability that made the app highly insecure. Such a discovery didn't surprise Meunier. "It's a secure computing class; naturally students want to discover vulnerabilities."

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is stepping up its fight against online fraud with a new initiative called Operation Identity Shield, according to a senior FBI official.