It's hard to read in-store signage, magazine or newspaper advertisements or product brochures these days without seeing a quick response Code (QR Code) – the blocky, square two-dimensional barcodes that let smartphone users quickly jump to a Web address by simply taking a photo of the code block.
David Braue | 02 May | Read more
It turns out not even your lounge room is safe from hackers: reports suggest a LAN-based attack on a number of Samsung TVs can put the TV into an infinite restart loop that can't be stopped without calling in a technician.
David Braue | 01 May | Read more
Australian enterprises may be rushing to embrace cloud computing, but those making the transition must take a proactive approach to infrastructure security that lets them provide consistent information assurance across public, private and hybrid cloud models.
David Braue | 17 Apr | Read more
Malware authors continued to pull new cards from their bags of tricks, with suggestions a new approach uses JavaScript to look for mouse movements, indicating that the visitor is a real person and not a security vendor’s automated malware scanner. In the absence of mouse movement, no malware will be offered.
David Braue | 17 Apr | Read more
Cyber-attacks may have been adjudged to be one of the most serious security threats facing the world, and the nasties out there were certainly doing their part to make sure we didn't forget it. Credit-card payments processor Global Payments said that fewer than 1.5 million cards were affected by the recent data theft, but struggled with its corporate messaging in the wake of the significant breach. .
David Braue | 11 Apr | Read more
The use of Facebook and Google credentials to log onto multiple services has been heralded as a benchmark in service integration, but a recent study has shown the protocols used to facilitate such logins remain woefully inadequate. This is a significant weak point in cloud-based services, while Microsoft's decision to release an anti-malware tool for its Azure cloud service seems to counter the company's own advice that one of Azure's benefits is to avoid reliance on security software.
David Braue | 03 Apr | Read more
Cyber-attacks have outrated nearly every other type of threat in a risk assessment published by the World Economic Forum, reiterating the importance of proactive security measures over the next 10 years.
David Braue | 02 Apr | Read more
Discussion over Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol security hole continued, with some asking questions about its implications.
David Braue | 26 Mar | Read more
The SXSW conference in the US became a hotbed of debate over privacy around 'big data' collection, while the problem is set to get worse with a flurry of new apps debuting at the show based entirely around knowing and sharing your location.
David Braue | 20 Mar | Read more
You’d never know it from their profligate and often undiscerning consumption of social media, but a significant majority of punters are concerned about their online privacy and would prefer that their personal information were more carefully protected online – or not collected at all.
David Braue | 15 Mar | Read more
It's a lesson learnt all too painfully by all sorts of people in the past: don't cross a hacker or you never know what will happen. Sadly, the developers of the Ruby on Rails team learned this this hard way after a user, who had warned of a vulnerability in the project's code repository on GitHub, hacked into the site to make a point after the development team dismissed his notification.
David Braue | 14 Mar | Read more
Efforts to improve the security of cloud services will get a boost on March 21, when aeronautics and defence contracting giant Lockheed Martin will open a software testing laboratory in Canberra from which software engineers will be able to test their solutions against emerging cloud standards.
David Braue | 09 Mar | Read more
Food and beverage-industry companies are the top target for cybercriminals – but even they are waiting up to six months before they know they've been hit, security consultancy Trustwave has warned.
David Braue | 08 Mar | Read more
A good proportion of companies feel they are ready to identify potential security threats – yet eight out of 10 companies reported a significant security incident last year and many had no idea of their impact or how to react to them, the latest McAfee State of Security report (www.mcafee.com/ssp) has found.
David Braue | 07 Mar | Read more
Following on from the hack of analyst firm Stratfor in December, Wikileaks has published more than five million emails from the group — painting in stark clarity just what can happen if you don't take your security seriously enough. And while CIOs should consider their risk culture and are expected to boost security spending in 2012, it's crucial to make sure your company's site is secure before you try to implement anti-distributed denial of service (DDoS) systems, one group warned.
David Braue | 05 Mar | Read more