Ransomware is increasingly becoming a problem for companies, and the CEO of a leading computer security company says he fears 2017 could see entire companies shut down until they pay up, or risk losing all their data. Ransomware works by infiltrating a computer with malware and then encrypting all the files on the disk. The…
Microsoft was closed-mouthed yesterday about why it postponed the month’s security updates, but a patch expert argued that it was probably due to one of more problems with the company’s update service infrastructure, not a single flawed fix. “Something is broken in the infrastructure, in Windows Update or the [Microsoft Update] Catalog, is my guess,”…
Amazon Web Services got off to a slow start in January, taking its time to sleep off the New Year’s festivities. But the cloud provider got up to speed by the end of the month, launching a handful of new products for its customers to work with. Last year, the cloud provider launched 1,017 new…
Over the years, state lawmakers and governors have tried to deter the use of foreign workers, mostly with legislation or executive orders prohibiting state work from being completed overseas. But a Maryland lawmaker has what may be a unique approach with a bill now scheduled for a what could be a contentious legislative hearing. The…
SAN FRANCISCO — In some ways, Google is like every other large enterprise. It had the typical defensive security posture based on the concept that the enterprise is your castle and security involves building moats and walls to protect the perimeter. Over time, however, that perimeter developed holes as Google’s increasingly mobile workforce, scattered around…
Yahoo has begun warning individual users that their accounts with the service may have been compromised in a massive data breach it reported late last year. The warning, in email messages sent from Yahoo CISO Bob Lord, tell users that a forged cookie may have been used to access their accounts in previous years. The warning…
Facebook’s Boston-area outpost is in Cambridge, close to MIT – they’ve just expanded from a smaller site and annexed a whole floor of a well-kept office building near Kendall Square Station. The first thing you see when you get off the elevator is a floor-to-ceiling pattern of blue lines that are meant to spell out…
The U.S. solar market nearly doubled its electricity-generating capacity last year, as 14.6 megawatts (MW) of new photovoltaic panels were installed throughout the country. There was a 95% increase in new solar installations over the previous year, when 7.5MW were installed, according to a new report from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association…
Researchers have devised a new attack that can bypass one of the main exploit mitigations in browsers: address space layout randomization (ASLR). The attack takes advantage of how modern processors cache memory and, because it doesn’t rely on a software bug, fixing the problem is not easy. Researchers from the Systems and Network Security Group…
It’s been a long time since there’s been any news about a premium Android tablet. What was once a burgeoning product category has fallen flat as high-end phones become bigger and more powerful, and most new tablets that have been released over the past year are either targeted at budget buyers or children. But with…