Security

The most widely used open source software packages for the enterprise are exposing users to significant and unnecessary business risks, according to an open source security study from security firm Fortify Software. The study, released Monday, concludes that open source software development communit...

As Mozilla went after a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in a 24-hour period with its release of Firefox 3, it didn't take security researchers long to drop a bomb on all the browsing fun. TippingPoint's DVLabs reported that its Zero Day Initiative program received a critical vulnerabili...

After three days of attacks by leading hackers, a laptop running Ubuntu remained untouched while two others, running Mac OS X and Windows Vista Service Pack 1, succumbed. The attacks were launched at the CanSecWest PWN 2 OWN contest in Vancouver, Canada. This was sponsored by security firm TippingPo...

The Linux operating system is not immune to virus infections, although Linux-specific viruses are extremely rare. Linux servers face more risk of virus attack than Linux desktops. That said, IT security and control firm Sophos recently issued a warning about potential virus infections targeting Linu...

The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group -- which claims to be the world's most attractive hacker group -- has released Goolag Scanner, an open source tool that uses Google's search engines to look for vulnerabilities in Web sites. Goolag Scanner is either a Web auditing tool that can be used by securi...

Mozilla released an update Thursday that corrects several vulnerabilities in the Firefox Web browser. Firefox 2.0.0.12 patches critical flaws that could result in Web browsing history and forward navigation stealing; privilege escalation that could allow cross-site scripting exploits; and crashes wi...

It's the bane of anyone who uses the Internet: remembering different user IDs, passwords and registration information for sites you use regularly. Soon, you may not have to. Some of the Internet's biggest players -- Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign -- are working on a new single sign-on th...

Yahoo, with its 248 million active registered users worldwide, has announced that all of them will be able to use their Yahoo IDs as an OpenID to let them eliminate separate IDs and logins at Web sites that support the open, decentralized digital identity framework. "What Yahoo has announced today i...

Many companies are running software on their Web servers that contains open source code with known vulnerabilities, a security firm has found. Software risk management solutions firm Palamida has expanded its Vulnerability Reporting Solution detection capabilities to include 431 open source security...

San Francisco-based security firm Coverity has been working with support from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and with Stanford University to find flaws in open source software, and it looks like they've found plenty. Since March 2006, an online Coverity software scanning site has analyzed ...

Linux and Apple OS X users are usually insulated from the security woes of their Microsoft Windows counterparts, but that doesn't seem to be the case with a recent vulnerability involving the handling of Uniform Resource Identifier protocols. Those protocols instruct a browser to perform certain tas...

A long-simmering debate among top Linux developers has boiled over recently, resulting in a flame war of sorts on a kernel forum. Linux creator Linus Torvalds and kernel developers working to harden Linux systems with security modules have been exchanging heated words over a security application sla...

Firefox users had a recent rude awakening about a vulnerability in the way Apple's QuickTime plug-in interacts with their Web browser. Far from grumbling, however, Mozilla supporters say their patch for the vulnerability says more about Mozilla's strengths than its browser's weakness. "It seems that...

Targeting small and medium-sized businesses, Zmanda on Wednesday introduced an advanced enterprise-class release of its open source backup software called "Amanda." Proprietary backup and recovery software vendors haven't had to worry much about open source competition up to now. After all, they cou...

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, asserted there has to be some decisive Ubuntu community action to make sure it doesn't suffer another outage. Canonical had to shut down five of eight servers in order to avert potential hacker attacks earlier this month. "Either th...