SecurityWeek

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has asked for $6.3 billion dollars in her budget plan that addresses the state’s fiscal calendar for 2013-14, which starts July 1. Of that, $47 million is for IT spending.

Tehran - A local civil defense official denied an earlier account that a fresh cyber attack on industrial units in the southern province of Hormuzgan had been repelled, Iran's state broadcaster website reported Tuesday.

Tehran - Iran has repelled a fresh cyber attack on its industrial units in a southern province, a local civil defense official said on Tuesday, accusing "enemies" of nonstop attacks against its infrastructure.

COLOMBO - Police in Sri Lanka arrested at least 114 Chinese nationals over an alleged Internet currency fraud, during a string of raids in and around Colombo, officials said on Saturday. The arrests were made after Chinese police sought assistance from their Sri Lankan counterparts in cracking the alleged fraud ring. "They were charged under the Cyber Crime Act," a lawyer who assisted the inquiry but did not wish to be named told AFP.

According to TrendMicro, Google Play and two other top third-party app stores are hosting a combined 1,730 malicious apps as of the first week of this month. As December winds to a close, it’s estimated that tens of thousands would have downloaded them.

Just a week after issuing a patch to address a critical directory traversal vulnerability (CVE-2012-5978) in its View server products, VMware on Thursday issued several security fixes that affect multiple product lines.

Santa Doesn’t Care if You Were Naughty or Nice on Christmas Eve – What Matters is How you Did all Year. Security is Much the Same.

BEIJING - Chinese authorities, who have long sought to limit access to information, seem to have reinforced the so-called Great Firewall of China, frustrating foreign companies and raising activists' concerns. The Great Firewall -- the country's huge system of Internet limits and censorship -- now appears to be stepping up targeting of virtual private networks, or VPNs, commonly used to circumvent controls on websites the government considers threatening.

Facebook to Charge for Some Message DeliverySAN FRANCISCO - Facebook on Thursday began testing the feasibility of charging to guarantee that messages from strangers make it into inboxes of intended recipients at the social network.

Talk that the Mayan calendar put the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012, has produced everything from websites touting conspiracy theories to a feature film called '2012'.  Now, it has also brought the public emails laced with malware in an attack that has more to do with revisiting the past than ending the present.

The European Union's cyber-security agency outlined the challenges of protecting European power grids and released a framework to establish baseline standards to secure smart grids.

Earlier this week, SecurityWeek reported on the discovery of a new vulnerability in Exynos 4-powered devices from Samsung, including the Samsung Galaxy S2 and Galaxy S3 smartphones. The discovery came from developers on the XDA forums, who urged a patch as soon as possible. Samsung said recently that they plant to deliver on those requests.

Yesterday, SecurityWeek reported that the latest Apache-based rootkit was serving malicious links to the Sweet Orange exploit kit. As it turns out, the kit is gaining traction on the malicious parts of the Web by promising up and coming criminals new features and a larger slice of the victim pool.

Earlier this month Ang Cui, a fifth-year graduate student from the Columbia University Intrusion Detection Systems Lab, demonstrated a series of vulnerabilities while presenting at the Amphion Forum. One of them, affecting VoIP offerings from Cisco, was previously patched, but the researcher claims that didn’t fix the issue.

Privacy Is Impossible Without Security, and Security is Being Challenged By the Privacy Requirements of Transparency and Access.