security

Trying to sway public opinion about a flailing product, Microsoft has reportedly once again boasted about the security of Windows Vista, claiming that the operating system had 36 vulnerabilities in its first year compared to the 65 found in Windows ... XP during that same period. Analysts remain skeptical. "I think that it's fair to say that Windows Vista is proving to be the most secure version of Windows to date. Our investments in the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) and our defense in depth approach to building Windows Vista seem to be paying off," wrote Austin Wilson in a recent ... (view more)

Scary: A recent survey sponsored by Deloitte ... (view more)

Updates are supposed to help us, aren't they? Not always. In this case, a recent security update from Microsoft has completely blocked a number of users from accessing the web with the company's own browser, Internet Explorer. For those who are ... reading this in Explorer after downloading update MS07-069, consider yourselves lucky. The bulletin was released December 11th, and since that time users have been flooding Microsoft's support forums with complaints that they can no longer regularly connect to the Internet. In some cases, the browser shuts down about 50-60% of the time, displaying an ... (view more)

Security experts have found a way to intercept information from Microsoft's wireless keyboards, and warn that other brands could also be at risk. The affected keyboards don't use the popular Bluetooth technology, but instead broadcast on a very ... short radio frequency. Most surprisingly, the encryption appears to be shockingly weak. It turns out that much only the keystrokes themselves are encrypted, not any of the background information such as that used to synchronise the keyboard and computer. Shockingly, the same encryption key (the code needed to decipher the data) is used for the entire ... (view more)

Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, have dismissed a Microsoft study claiming Internet Explorer has fewer security problems. The study was produced by Jeff Jones, a Microsoft security researcher. He compared the publicly-announced ... problems of both new and old versions of both browsers. His figures say that in the past three years, Internet Explorer has had 87 'vulnerabilities' (potential security problems that need fixing), while Firefox has had 199. He also found that Microsoft was improving security at a quicker pace; looking at vulnerabilities for each version of a browser in ... (view more)

The Cold War ended almost twenty years ago. After decades of tension between the two nuclear superpowers, the Russian people opted for democracy and economic change, taking a much different political stance than dictators like Stalin and Krushchev. ... Now, it seems something else is ready to replace the Soviets in threatening American -- and global -- national security. Some analysts now fear that the world is about to be crushed within the icy grasp of a "cyber cold war". The frightening concept comes after prominent security company McAfee released their annual report last week. According to ... (view more)

A security expert has produced proof that Internet phone calls could be hacked. Peter Cox has produced a program named SIPtap, which is designed to monitor VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) streams that carry phone calls through services such as ... Skype. The program can record conversations as audio files and even index the calls by date or caller. The software only needs to be installed on one machine (through a virus) to record all the calls made on the network. A skilled hacker could even install it across an entire Internet service provider's system. Mr. Cox has only used SIPtap to prove ... (view more)

"Black Friday" really isn't so bad. Despite the fact that Friday, November 23 represents the busiest shopping day of the year, it's certainly no Black Tuesday: the infamous October 29, 1929 stock market crash that sent the world into a decade of ... desperate poverty. "Black Friday" doesn't really stack up. Or, does it? According to some security experts, Black Friday could indeed prove a frightening day for the world's web users. Vice president of strategic accounts for Secure Computing Paul Henry recently warned all Internet surfers to be especially vigilant today. "The holiday season in ... (view more)

In a recent article written by Bruce Schneier, noted cryptographer from e-media mag Wired.com, the author examines the research (PDF) of security experts Niels Ferguson and Dan Shumow, presenters at the CRYPTO 2007 conference this past August. ... Ferguson and Shumow suggest that an algorithm for generating random numbers included in an official standard document (PDF) by the National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST ) contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor . Earlier this year the U.S. government released a new official standard for random-number generators that ... (view more)

We hear a lot about Internet threats as they develop, but how are these scares addressed by the government? According to one survey, the potential for disaster has convinced about 65% of the country's government-employed IT managers to spend more ... time on security than they did in 2006. The recent survey was conducted by Cisco Systems, no slouch in the security sphere. The security firm found that spyware and bots remain the top concern of most answering the survey, with security breaches and poor training finishing second and third. Part of the reason for spyware's infamous rise has something ... (view more)