SecurityWeek

On Thursday, Joshua Schichtel was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and ordered to three years of supervised release. The sentence comes after he pled guilty to selling access to botnets last August. Schichtel, 30, of Phoenix, Arizona, pled guilty to one count of attempting to cause damage to multiple computers without authorization by the transmission of programs, codes or commands. 

Analyzing data collected and categorized by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, researchers at Rapid7 crunched the numbers and determined that over the last three years, more than 94 million records containing personally identifiable information (PII) were exposed due to data breaches in the government sector.

NEW YORK, NY - Netherlands-based AVG Technologies, maker of popular free and premium Internet security software, this week officially launched its 2013 product line. The AVG 2013 lineup includes new versions of the company’s free and paid products, and additional enhancements to its security and performance optimization products.

The US Secret Service is investigating claims that someone has stolen the Mitt Romney’s tax returns, with plans to release them of their demands are not met. News of the extortion broke late Wednesday, after the discovery of a post on Pastebin with the claims. As it turns out, campaign offices for both the Democrats and Republicans had received the extortion demands late last week.

Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant subject to an investigation on Capitol Hill looking into their alleged ties to the PLA, has published a report on cyber security perspectives. The report is a mix of company promotion, as well as an indirect answer to Congress’ claims.

CipherCloud's new tool allows businesses to encrypt data in-transit, in-use, and at-rest for both public and private cloud applications.

Mac OS X users should run Software Update to check whether the latest Java update fixing several security flaws is available. Even though the latest fix didn't make it into the update, a little patch is always better than no patch.

Microsoft is planning a relatively quiet release for Patch Tuesday with just a pair of security updates in tow next week.

A spokesperson for Sony has confirmed that the email addresses and names released earlier this week were taken from a server maintained by a third-party. The group responsible for the breach, NullCrew, has also hit other targets recently, including government and commercial sites in Cambodia.

Varonis Systems today announced the launch of the Varonis Data Transport Engine, new technology the company says will help organizations securely move and archive data.

Researchers may have figured out a way to break out of a virtual machine and take over the underlying host.

The direct costs related to global consumer cybercrime has dropped to $110 billion, according to the latest cybercrime survey. The same report last year estimated direct costs of $114 billion.