SecurityWeek

New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, alongside Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, announced a partnership between the city and Microsoft last week, which led to the development of crime prevention technologies that can also help where counterterrorism efforts are concerned. The system, which is said to cost between $30 and $40 million to develop, will be available to any law enforcement agency, and the City of New York will take a 30% cut of any future sale.

NEW YORK - (AFP) - Internet giant Google on Monday said it plans to lay off about 4,000 employees at cellphone maker Motorola Mobility, as it seeks to focus on sales of its Android devices.About two-thirds of the layoffs will come from outside the United States, and some 30 of Motorola Mobility's 90 global facilities will be shut, Google said.The aim of the cuts is to simplify the Motorola line of mobile phones "from feature phones to more innovative and...

Many large organizations are not confident in their ability to fight off the latest salvos of advanced persistent threats, and are relying on reactive approaches even as they talk about being more proactive, a new survey has found.

If Your Organization Has Information That is Valuable Enough to Keep Private, Then There is Value For An Attacker in Stealing It...

Towards the end of July, anti-Malware vendor Intego broke the story of Crisis, the name given to a Trojan that targets Mac OS X. On Friday, ThreatMetrix, a provider of technologies that help organizations combat fraud and malware, published a report that breaks the code down, and examines the internals of the latest so-called threat targeting Mac users.

PARIS - (AFP) - The battle for Syria is raging on the ground but also on social media, where people on both sides of the conflict are hacking, posting and spamming in a frenzied propaganda war.The Twitter feeds of news organizations have been hacked by pro-regime elements, videos purporting to show atrocities in Syria are regularly posted to YouTube and pro- or anti-government messages often flood Facebook pages.

SAN FRANCISCO - (AFP) - Facebook will submit to external audits of how well it guards users' data under the terms of a settlement finalized Friday with US authorities concerned about privacy abuses.

Project leverages popular search engines to identify vulnerable systems and sensitive data in corporate networks.Information is the key; hackers on both side of the law know this. Thus the tools recently released by security consulting firm Stach & Liu, and the DEF CON presentation given by Francis Brown and Rob Ragan, offer InfoSec teams a chance to win the information race.

At the Black Hat conference last month, PhishMe, a company that teaches security awareness to help users identify Phishing and targeted attacks, spoke to 250 security professionals and asked them for basic information on how their organizations deals with, or is impacted by, Phishing attacks. As it turns out, it’s a common issue, and most of the basics steps are doing little to lessen the blow.

Security researchers at Trusteer have uncovered another a new variant of new financial malware with advanced evasive capabilities.

Anonymous Hits Australian Security Intelligence Organisation With DDoS Attacks in #OpAustraliaSYDNEY - (AFP) - Anonymous on Friday claimed to have shut down a computer server belonging to Australia's domestic spy agency ASIO, reportedly briefly closing down access to its public webpage.The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) acknowledged some disruption to its website.

August 2012 Patch Tuesday Fixes To Include Patches for Internet Explorer and WindowsMicrosoft is planning to release nine security bulletins next week as part of Patch Tuesday – more than half of which are rated critical.

Adobe will be patching critical vulnerabilities in its Adobe Reader and Acrobat software as part of its scheduled quarterly update next week.

Blizzard Entertainment’s BattleNet (battle.net) portal, which allows gamers access to games such as Diablo III, World of Warcraft, and StarCraft II, has suffered a data breach, the company says. As a result, users are being encouraged to change their passwords. A statement from Blizzard was thin on details, but the company stresses that at this point, “credit card and other customer payment data does NOT appear to have been accessed or affected.”

WASHINGTON - (AFP) - The FBI warned computer users on Thursday to ignore a fake message, purportedly from its officers, that freezes people's screens and demands that they pay a fine for visiting inappropriate websites."We're getting inundated with complaints," said Donna Gregory from the US Internet Crime Complaint Center, referring to the virus known as Reveton ransomware, which has hit users in the United States and globally.