Organizations talk a good game when it comes to security, but many still focus the majority of their security resources on the network rather than their applications--the vector for most data breaches. Many organizations dedicate less than 10 percent of their IT security budget to application security, according to a study by research firm the Ponemon Institute, released earlier this year.
An IT assessment firm announced Thursday that it is releasing an open-source framework that can be used to gauge the security of smart meters.
Cleveland-based SecureState, which is planning to demonstrate the tool, dubbed Termineter, next week at the Security B-Sides conference in Las Vegas, said the purpose of the release is to raise security awareness for smart meters.
Modern HTML rendering engines and emerging standards make it possible to create a new class of rich experiences that could previously be achieved only with native development toolkits—but developers need better Web development frameworks and authoring tools in order to take advantage of the possibilities.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the release of Raspbian, its own custom Debian-based distribution for the mini-computer. The SD-card-sized image replaces the current recommended install option which is also Debian-based.
With the Gold Master of Apple’s next ‘big cat’ operating system, Mountain Lion aka OS X 10.8 released to developers last week, it seems like a good a time as any to write up a quick install / upgrade guide for all Gigabyte z68x-UD3-B3 hackintosh users. (Note: If you’re looking for the OS X 10.7 install guide from last year, the link is here).
Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 14.0.1, the latest major stable release of the popular open source web browser. This update now uses secured search via Google's HTTPS interface by default, providing users with more security and privacy when searching the web. The browser's "Awesome Bar" has been fitted with an auto completion mechanism for URLs which tries to guess what site a user is trying to navigate to based on their browsing history.
About 100 hackers from across the country are taking part in a ‘hackathon’ from early Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon. Rest assured, they are not planning something sinister like, say, breaking into top secret government documents and the like; instead they are developing new applications that could be used in an SMS platform.
A recent update to Symantec's antivirus software rendered some Windows-based PCs inoperable, the security software maker disclosed Friday.
An update earlier this week to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1 antivirus software for businesses caused some Windows XP-based computers to crash repeatedly with a "blue screen of death," the company revealed on its Web site.
Among the enhancements queued up by Mozilla in the next weeks for the new Firefox beta will be a new debugger for web applications. Firefox's JavaScript engine has been providing debugger support to extensions, most notably Firebug, for some years, but with Firefox 15, the entire debugging interface of Spidermonkey, the JavaScript engine, has been redesigned. This has eliminated much of the performance penalty that comes with running JavaScript code with a live debugger and it allows the debugger to be run remotely.
Security researchers have found a live Web exploit that detects if the target is running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux and drops a different trojan for each platform.
The attack was spotted by researchers from antivirus provider F-Secure on a Columbian transport website, presumably after third-party attackers compromised it. The unidentified site then displayed a signed Java applet that checked if the user's computer is running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Based on the outcome, the attack then downloads the appropriate files for each platform.
