Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • McAfee buys data loss firm Reconnex

    $46 million acquisition announced as strong profit report released. McAfee has announced its official agreement to purchase privately owned data loss prevention firm Reconnex , in a deal worth $46 million. The move should strengthen McAfee ‘s position in the field, where the firm already has several solutions available. Reconnex specialises in appliance-based DLP solutions,…

  • Trend OfficeScan flaws labelled highly critical

    Web-delivered products at risk of allowing remote access. A set of vulnerabilities have been reported in Trend Micro ‘s Officescan product, which have been flagged with the ‘Highly Critical’ rating by vulnerability watchers at Secunia as exploitation could allow execution of code from remote sources. The vulnerabilities, buffer overflows in ActiveX objects used by the…

  • Sophos makes move to buy Utimaco

    €217 million bid launched for encryption specialist. Security light-heavyweight Sophos has issued official notice of its intention to buy German encryption firm Utimaco , in a share deal worth €217 million (over $340 million US). Utimaco produces a range of encryption products under the brand name SafeGuard , including solutions for protecting data on disk…

  • Patch Tuesday sees serious DNS flaws fixed

    Nothing marked critical, but some very important patches issued. Microsoft ‘s latest ‘Patch Tuesday’ round of security updates for once contains no bulletins marked as ‘critical’, but some of the four updates labelled ‘important’ address major issues posing serious threats to web users worldwide. Two of the patches fix problems with Exchange Server and Windows…

  • Storm mails bring spoof World War 3 news

    US-Iran war story used as hook for malware barrage. The Storm botnet has been spamming in force again in the past week, with its expected run targeting 4th of July celebrations in the US swiftly followed by a second campaign carrying news of a fictitious invasion of Iran by US forces. The mails have hyperbolic…

  • MAAWG unveils spam and botnet battling policies

    Working group of ISPs and net operators issue traffic calming guidelines. Global collaboration body the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has ratified a set of guidelines developed by groups of members from around the world, and approved at a recent group meeting, aimed at combating botnets and spam at an ISP level. The guidelines focus…

  • Macs under attack from trojan double whammy

    Two new threats in a week spark worries of approaching Mac malware era. Users of Apple Mac systems, who have so far only suffered from minimal attention from malware creators, may need to take more care in future according to some security analysts, after the exposure of a significant vulnerability in the operating system and…

  • China hosting over half of malicious sites

    StopBadware.org report highlights Chinese dominance in web malware. A report from StopBadware.org released last week found that 52% of malicious websites were hosted in China, with the US the only other major player in the field with 21%. The report was compiled from the list of active malicious sites flagged by Google ‘s Safe Browsing…

  • Trojan-to-worm automation tool spotted

    GUI gizmo adds extra spreading menace to any malware. Researchers at Panda have discovered a simple and colourful graphical application designed to add basic worm techniques to trojans, giving any piece of malicious code the ability to spread itself across networks. The tool, dubbed ‘Constructor/wormer’ by Panda , also allows a number of advanced options…

  • LinkScanner could be behind surge in web traffic

    Traffic analysts worry as AVG implements web scanning technology. AVG ‘s LinkScanner technology, added to its portfolio after the acquisition of Exploit Prevention Labs last December, has made its way into the company’s massively popular desktop products, thought to be in use on as many as 70 million systems worldwide. With 20 million of those…

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