Ryan Naraine

An easy-to-exploit security vulnerability in Apple Computer’s QuickTime media player could put millions of Macintosh and Windows users at risk of code execution attacks. The QuickTime flaw kicked off the Month of Apple Bugs project, which promises to expose unpatched Mac OS X and Apple application vulnerabilities on a daily basis throughout the month of […]

Who will find the first major security flaw in Windows Vista? Will it be released as zero-day? Is there an end in sight to the botnet menace? Is spam close to being canned? Just who are these criminals phishing for your credit card data? Those are just a handful of the hot-button topics that will […]

Anti-virus researchers have spotted the first signs of an adware/spyware program capable of launching browser windows on Apple Computer’s Mac OS X. According to a warning from F-Secure, a security vendor in Helsinki, Finland, the proof-of-concept program could be silently installed on a Mac’s User account and hooked to each application used by that account. […]

Oracle has shipped a monster critical patch update with fixes for more than 100 security vulnerabilities in a wide range of database and server products. The new-look bulletin, which includes CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) severity scores, patches about 120 bugs in the Oracle Database Server, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Application Express, Oracle Collaboration Suite, […]

Microsoft’s twice-yearly Blue Hat hacker summit, running Oct. 26-27, will kick off later this week with a demo of a virtual machine rootkit that can potentially be used to defeat the controversial PatchGuard technology. Dino Dai Zovi, a principal at penetration-testing outfit Matasano Security, has been invited to Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus to showcase a […]

It’s dress-down Friday at Sunbelt Software’s Clearwater, Fla., headquarters. In a bland cubicle on the 12th floor, Eric Sites stares at the screen of a “dirty box,” a Microsoft Windows machine infected with the self-replicating Wootbot network worm. Within seconds, there is a significant spike in CPU usage as the infected computer starts scanning the […]

Multiple security flaws in Bugzilla could put users of the software defect tracking software at risk of cross-site scripting, data manipulation and data exposure attacks. According to a warning from the open-source Bugzilla project, users should immediately upgrade to versions 2.18.6, 2.20.3, 2.22.1 or 2.23.3 to minimize the risk of malicious attacks. Security alerts aggregator […]

Oracle plans to make a significant change to the way product flaws are described in its security bulletins, an admission of sorts that the quarterly alerts were almost impossible to understand. Beginning with the Oct. 17 release of the scheduled CPU (Critical Patch Update), the Redwood Shores, Calif., database vendor will start adding severity scores […]

If the plan is perfectly executed, Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project will deploy 100 million laptops in the first year. In one fell swoop, the nonprofit organization will create the largest computing monoculture in history. Wary of the security risks associated with a computing monoculture—millions of machines with hardware and software of identical […]

For the second time this year, a major management reshuffle at Microsoft has sent ripples through the software maker’s security unit. Just seven months after tapping Ben Fathi to head up the newly formed STU (security technology unit), the Redmond, Wash. company announced that Fathi would move over to manage a Windows Core System development […]

MONTREAL—A computer security expert is predicting that hackers will crack the controversial PatchGuard kernel anti-tampering technology coming in Windows Vista within one year of its release. Alexander Czarnowski, chief executive of Avet, in Warsaw, Poland, said he believes it’s inevitable that the technology will be broken once the final version of Windows Vista is released […]

Can a small startup in San Francisco play a big role in the fight against the phishing scourge? OpenDNS, a 10-employee company with technological expertise in the domain-name-resolution field, is betting that a mix of social networking, Web services and user-generated submissions can power a valuable, freely available anti-phishing database. Phishing, which has emerged as […]