SecurityWeek

The U.S. Senate has failed once again to move forward on the Cybersecurity Act, raising the question of what is next in the struggle to legislate solutions to threats in cyberspace.  

WASHINGTON - The White House said Thursday it was considering an executive order on cybersecurity after legislation on infrastructure protection failed again in the Senate.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Coined by Benjamin Franklin back in 1736, and applicable to so many aspects of life and business, the phrase even served the IT security industry well for the first quarter of a century. But today this phrase no longer rings true.

According to a report form Forrester, despite their security concerns – and perhaps because most IT managers simply have no other option – as many as one-third of enterprises are placing sensitive data into the cloud.

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), released their 2013 cyber-threat forecast on Wednesday. The report examines what they think will be the most serious issues online in the next twelve months. The face of cybersecurity has changed over the last year, the report says, as attackers have aligned with national agendas, and taken aim at businesses and governments alike.

WASHINGTON - A US commission on Wednesday urged lawmakers to consider tighter rules on investment by Chinese state-owned firms, warning that they may pose economic as well as security risks. In an annual report to Congress, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission also called for efforts to bring China into arms reduction talks due to Beijing's growing expenditure on opaque weapons programs.

BELIZE CITY - Prime Minister Dean Barrow on Wednesday urged anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee, wanted for questioning in the murder of a neighbor, to turn himself in to Belizean authorities. McAfee, 67, told CNBC television Tuesday that he was moving every four hours to avoid police who want to question him about the murder of fellow American Gregory Faull, a Florida native who was found dead at his home in a pool of blood.

Researchers at ID Analytics estimate there are more than 10,000 criminal rings dealing in identity fraud in the United States. Most of these rings consist of family and friends, not professional criminals, the researchers found.

The nation's space agency is facing a data breach after an employee laptop was stolen from a locked car. The incident may finally force the organization to adopt whole disk encryption to protect sensitive data.

Adobe Confirms Breach on Connectusers.com –  Site Taken OfflineAdobe has confirmed claims made by an Egyptian hacker that a database behind Connectusers.com was breached. The company is still investigating, but cached copies of the forum’s source code show a possible explanation as to the cause – outdated forum software.

Tibetan activists are being targeted by a new variant of the Imuler (Revir) Trojan that was originally discovered in September. The attack is launched via email, and uses images of other pro-Tibetan groups as bait in order to encourage the victim into opening files.

LAS VEGAS - Visibility was a commonly heard word at Palo Alto Networks' Ignite conference this week in Las Vegas as customers described the requirements of their network and what they need to enable users to deploy the applications they want without compromising security.

WASHINGTON - The investigation that toppled CIA chief David Petraeus has sparked fresh debate over online privacy and the government's ability to snoop into private email accounts. "When the CIA director cannot hide his activities online, what hope is there for the rest of us?" said Chris Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union's Privacy and Technology Project

Just when you start getting comfortable thinking that DDoS or SQL injections are the attack methods that deserve your heavyweight protective measures, another type of vulnerability rears its ugly head larger and louder. Recently it's been cross-site attacks that are on the rise and warrant close scrutiny.

Vormetric, a provider of enterprise encryption and key management solutions, today announced that Alan Kessler has been appointed as the company’s new President and CEO. Kessler comes to Vormetric from HP where he was VP of Worldwide Sales and Service for Enterprise Security Products, and responsible for HP ArcSight, HP TippingPoint, HP Fortify, HP Application Security Center and HP Atalla product lines.