Data Protection — News

Without spam detection many of us would spend hours managing the daily load of e-mails. Nina Balcan develops machine learning methods that could be used to develop personalized automatic programs for deciding whether an e-mail is spam or not. For her efforts, the computer scientist from the Georgia Institute of Technology has just been awarded with a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship.

This is a continuation of the previous cloud deployment article where I created architectural questions that enable a consultant to understand what products are used to support a corporation's top 10 critical applications. Once these product lists are created, it is much easier to map private or public cloud products that can support these same applications.

The hacking group Anonymous is allegedly threatening to "destroy" Facebook on Nov. 5, accusing the social networking site of spying on users, cooperating with authoritarian governments and abusing people's privacy.

The increase in cyber attacks has driven a growth in demand for network security staff, according to a report into the information security jobs market.

A July cyberattack on Booz Allen Hamilton will not materially harm the company's bottom line, its CEO said Tuesday.

Bug bounty programs are designed to reward security researchers for finding flaws in a vendor's product that have made it past their own quality processes. Some organizations, such as Google and Mozilla, have had bug bounty programs in place for a time, while social networking site Facebook just announced a bug bounty program with a base reward of $500.

Microsoft has released 13 security updates for its August Patch Tuesday update, five of which it considered likely to see reliable exploits developed for within the next 30 days.

Hackers defaced the official Blackberry Blog today in retaliation for Research In Motion's pledge to assist police "in any way we can" in their efforts to quell the riots in London in recent days.

Some popular apps store sensitive data such as user names and passwords and credit card information in plain text on your phone's memory, making the data an easy target for hackers. A Chicago-based mobile forensics company called viaForensics recently found as much after completing an audit of dozens of the most popular apps on both iOS and Android platforms.

The Anonymous hacking group has added the website of the Syrian Ministry of Defense to its ever-lengthening list of victims, defacing it with a message in support of the anti-Government insurrection.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has found a school in Hampshire in breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA) after the personal details of nearly 20,000 people were put at risk when the school's website was hacked.

A Taiwanese political party suspects the Chinese government is behind a hacking attack that stole information about the party's election activities.

Cloud computing seems simple in concept, and indeed, simplicity of operation, deployment and licensing are its most appealing assets. But when it comes to questions of compliance, once you scratch the surface you'll find more questions than you asked in the first place, and more to think about than ever before.

Optus has been awarded PCI DSS compliance for its Business SmartPay system, making it the first telco to achieve such a status in Australia and New Zealand.

The volume of email containing polymorphic malware -- malicious software that can change its characteristics to evade detection by anti-virus defences -- has increased dramatically, according to security vendor Symantec.

In what appears to be a ramp-up of celebrity support, famous graphic novel author Alan Moore Monday issued a statement in praise of PFC Bradley Manning. Manning is the G.I. accused of leaking classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks.

At the Defcon conference in Las Vegas last week, kids aged 8 to 16 were exposed to the world of hacking. Some may fear indoctrinating a new generation of Anonymous and LulzSec members, but young minds can expand the horizons of technology and computer security to effectively combat hacking collectives such as these.

EMC has squirrelled away US$81.3 million in reserve to cover the cost of customer remediation in response to the attack on RSA’s SecurID system it revealed in March.

LAS VEGAS -- The relationship between CISOs and security penetration testers is anything but clear-cut and raises ethical issues for both parties, a Defcon crowd heard from a former CISO.

A 10-year-old California hacker just figured out what a bunch of developers apparently couldn't: How to hack various mobile phone and tablet based games by simply fiddling with the clock. And she just told all at the first annual DefCon Kids hacker conference—a subset of DEFCON, the self-identified "world's longest running and largest underground hacking conference"—which wrapped yesterday in Las Vegas.