SecurityWeek

Cloud-based security and compliance solutions provider Qualys has updated two of its products to help administrators better manage vulnerabilities and mitigation, the company said Wednesday at its own Qualys Security Conference in Las Vegas.

Increasingly sophisticated threats against the country's cyber-infrastructure means the country has to invest in protecting against, detecting, mitigating, and recovering from cyber-incidents.

The modern enterprise IT environment is extremely complex. A myriad of smartphones, tablets, applications and network devices, along with the growing use of virtualization and cloud services, all present an increasing volume of management and security concerns.

An assembly of tech giants including AMD, Honeywell, Intel, Lockheed Martin, and RSA, has come together to form the “Cyber Security Research Alliance”, a consortium that will focus on the "grand challenges" for cyber security and next generation technologies.

AlienVault, the company behind open source SIEM, OSSIM, on Wednesday announced the formation of the Open Minds Exchange (OME), a resource center housing a collection of research, tools, and thoughts from both their in house experts and those in the security community. In an effort to make access to this data readily available, the security firm released two mobile applications for iOS as part of the initiative.

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, has suffered a data breach resulting in the loss of customer credit card data. Notification of the breach was withheld for more than a month at the request of the FBI.

China's Huawei Blasts US 'Protectionism' - Says It Would Offer "Complete and Unrestricted Access" To Its Source Code And Equipment Through An Independent Testing Center.

BRUSSELS - Microsoft did not meet commitments to provide clients a web browser choice in 2011-12, the European Commission said Wednesday as it pursued a probe that could lead to more fines for the US software giant. Microsoft had made a legally binding commitment to provide such a choice and it was a serious matter to breach them, European Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said.

LAS VEGAS - McAfee FOCUS 2012 - The security community generally can be counted on to agree on one thing – the amount of malware is growing. The question then becomes what to do about it.

A new report from Verizon examined a subset of the data included in its annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) to glean some insights about intellectual property thefts.

The University of Alabama’s Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research (CIA|JFR) has received $250,000 from the world’s largest social network, thanks in part to their help in taking down the Koobface gang. The money comes from legal winnings earned by Facebook, after they started taking spammers and scammers to court.

Deloitte Survey Shows Few State CISOs Are Confident In Their States' Ability to Defend Against Cyber Attacks Less than a quarter of state chief information security officers were confident in their states' ability to safeguard data from attacks, according to a recent Deloitte & Touche survey. Only 32 percent of the CISOs felt state employees have the "required cyber-security competency."

OTTAWA - Canada "has been slow" to set up firewalls to protect against cyber threats to critical infrastructure, leaving the nation vulnerable to crippling attacks, the auditor general warned Tuesday. In a report, Auditor General Michael Ferguson said the government has made only "limited progress" over the past decade to safeguard electrical grids, telecommunications infrastructure, banking systems, manufacturing and transportation, as well as its own computers.

BRUSSELS - The European Commission outlined measures Tuesday to tighten controls on online gambling, a fast-growing, multi-billion-euro industry, to combat fraud, money laundering and rigging of sport fixtures. "Consumers, but more broadly all citizens, must be adequately protected," European internal markets commissioner Michel Barnier said.

Adobe has released security updates addressing critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Shockwave Player as part of its regularly scheduled update.

Return Path, provider of email intelligence information and solutions, today launched two anti-phishing solutions that it says will arm brand marketers and IT security professionals with tools to protect their brands through visibility into known, unknown and potentially harmful, fraudulent email traffic.

The Federal Trade Commission has published a staff report containing guidelines and recommendations for companies that use facial recognition technologies. The compilation of best practices is aimed at protecting consumers when such technologies are deployed for purposes such as marketing.

According to its security roundup for Q3 2012, Trend Micro says that the number of high-risk and overall dangerous applications targeting the Android platform is more than five times the size it was last quarter.

Digital Guardian 6.1 Includes Advanced Malware Prevention, Detection and Containment, Extends Coverage to Windows 8 and iOS Verdasys, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based information security solutions provider, this week released Digital Guardian 6.1, a new solution touted by the company as the beginning of the DLP 3.0 era.

CloudLock, a provider of cloud data security solutions, today launched “CloudLock Apps Firewall”, a solution that the company says helps enterprises discover, classify and enable trusted third party mobile and web applications that require access to users’ Google Apps accounts and data.