Security

Google has begun rolling out a patch to fix a security flaw in versions 2.3.3 and earlier of its Android mobile operating system. That flaw affects all Google services using the ClientLogin authentication protocol. It lets hackers access any personal data available through Android's application prog...

Mobile malware may grow as a security threat this year, but security researcher Ralf-Philipp Weinmann says there's a worse threat lurking around -- the GSM baseband system. The threat from hacking GSM baseband systems has been largely ignored, Weinmann reportedly told the audience at a presentation ...

Have you run a virus scan lately? Nope? Don't need to, you say. That's because you run a Linux OS. Think again. To quote the title line of Bob Dylan's third studio album, "the times they are a-changin.'" Yes they are. And part of that change is the greater risk of malware attacks to the Linux operat...

Android smartphone users in Russia have been hit by a Trojan that, once installed, starts spouting off SMS text messages to premium numbers, Kaspersky Labs revealed on Tuesday. The attack is sent through a fake codec -- a media player application -- that users are asked to download and install. Once...

Google announced Thursday that it has remotely deleted two Android applications from users' phones, reasoning that the "practically useless" apps had "intentionally misrepresented their purpose." The Internet search giant pointed to this action as one of many security controls Android posses to prot...

Roughly one out of five Android mobile apps asks to access private or sensitive information belonging to the device's owner, according to a study by SMobile Systems. One out of 20 apps can place a call to any number without interacting with or getting permission from the device owner, the report als...

It's hard to imagine a topic more central to the argument for or against free and open source software than security. Hardly a day goes by without news of some fresh exploit in the Windows environment, after all -- but what about Linux and other open software? Can they do better? That's essentially ...

The question of security is one that has plagued proponents of proprietary and open source software alike for as long as there has been a choice. Is free and open source software more secure by virtue of all the many pairs of eyes that can see the code, identify vulnerabilities and fix them? Or is "...

Ask fans of FOSS what keeps them loyal to free and open source software, and security will likely be high on the list. Ask proponents of paid, proprietary software, however, and they may well say the same thing. On the one hand, there's the argument that open source software is more secure because t...

Open source software is often considered more secure than proprietary counterparts by virtue primarily of the many sets of eyes that can find and patch any vulnerabilities, but a new report suggests otherwise. In fact, the broad visibility of open source code serves to make it more easily exploitabl...

Enterprise application whitelisting company Bit9 launched an attention-getting press release last week, a document which merely bubbled for a few days until the recent Internet Explorer flaw took center stage and Mozilla pushed out a few Firefox updates. Eventually, the heat under the issue boiled o...

Regardless of all its hype, security in cloud computing is not a revolution; rather it's an evolution of the age-old business model of outsourcing. The concept of cloud computing has evolved from the concepts of grid, utility, and SaaS, and these models evolved from the application service provider ...

Red Hat issued a security advisory Friday notifying customers that some of its servers were compromised last week due to a network attack. The company called the advisory critical and said it sent out the alert primarily for those who may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than those ...

Interoperability is fast becoming a key watchword in business computing circles. Open source products continue to gain enterprise acceptance. With that acceptance comes an increase in users who demand that data produced with one application to work with data produced for another application -- or ev...

New adopters often see virtualization as the Holy Grail of enterprise computing. It enables consolidation of separate servers and databases to provide more economic operations. Running consolidated computers from one virtualized machine also eliminates the electrical waste spent to keep idling serve...