hat

Report: Malware-laden sites double from a year ago

More than 1 million Web sites were believed to be infected with malware in the fourth quarter of last year, nearly double from the previous year, according to figures released today by Dasient.

Malvertising, advertising containing malware, also is on the rise, with impressions doubling to 3 million per day from the third quarter of 2010, Dasient said in a blog post.

"The probability that an average Internet user will hit an infected page after three months of Web browsing is 95 percent," the company said.

The news corresponds with information released this week by another security firm. … Read more

Database economics in cloud and virtualization

Many of the most interesting big economic landmarks in IT have happened around what might be called "re-platforming," as users take existing applications and redeploy them on new platforms, such as we see when applications move from corporate data centers to the Amazon Web Services EC2 or the Rackspace Cloud.

We see this trend every few years, for example when the IT masses switched from the mainframe to the client server world, and then again when we went from big iron Unix to Intel-driven X86 commodity platforms. Today, cloud and virtualization represent the next major re-platforming trend as … Read more

Researchers turn USB cable into attack tool

Two researchers have figured out a way to attack laptops and smartphones through an innocent-looking USB cable.

Angelos Stavrou, an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason University, and student Zhaohui Wang wrote software that changes the functionality of the USB driver so that they could launch a surreptitious attack while someone is charging a smartphone or syncing data between a smartphone and a computer.

Basically, the exploit works by adding keyboard or mouse functionality to the connection so an attacker can then start typing commands or click the mouse in order to steal files, download additional malware, or … Read more

Pick from the hat

Like many free applications, The Hat from Harmony Hollow Software uses software to do something usually done "the hard way." In this case, it's drawing names from a hat, the time-honored method for randomly selecting individual entries from a group. The app can randomize a list of names so no one can complain about who goes first and who goes last. It can also draw individual names or pairs of names for raffles, sweepstakes, and ongoing contests. It does this all without requiring you to actually write down names, cut up the list, and throw it all … Read more

Red Hat acquires Makara for cloud platform

Red Hat jumped back into the acquisition game announcing this morning that it has acquired

Makara, a start-up focused on providing a cloud platform (platform-as-a-service, or PaaS) for Java and PHP applications on both public and private clouds.

The open-source stalwart has been on the PaaS march for the last few months for a number of reasons, including the necessity to support applications in multiple environments and demand for private cloud solutions from large enterprises.

If you read between the lines from Red Hat executive comments (and the rumor mill), it seemed like Red Hat had Makara, or a Makara-like … Read more

Red Hat announces Enterprise Linux 6

Red Hat today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest release of its operating platform, saying it is designed to support the new enterprise architectures of today, whether physical, virtual, or cloud-based.

The company said the new release includes "hundreds of technical feature enhancements" that are designed to improve agility, reduce costs, and reduce IT complexity. It also includes a range of updated server and desktop apps. More importantly, the company said the new release is designed to be as "future proof" as possible.

Pricing was not announced, but the company is … Read more

Report: 95 percent of all e-mail is spam

Spam accounted for 95 percent of all e-mail sent worldwide during the third quarter, according to a report released today.

Panda Security's third-quarter report (PDF) also found that 50 percent of all spam came from 10 countries, with India, Brazil, and Russia as the top three sources. The U.S. came in No. 8, while the U.K. dropped off the list. Much of the spam that invades in-boxes comes from botnets that hijack computers whose owners don't realize their PCs have been infected, the report noted.

Trojans now are responsible for 55 percent of all malware threats, … Read more

Red Hat adds to its cloud appeal

Red Hat made several announcements Wednesday related to the development of public and private clouds, including updates to its Cloud Foundation portfolio, the effort to make its Deltacloud a standard API, a flagship cloud customer, and a new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering.

The company is working to create a comprehensive cloud offering--at least in theory--with new products that address the various layers of what can be considered cloud infrastructure.

This is all interesting, especially because Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens recently stated that cloud services are at least a decade away. Apparently, the company is taking the long-term view that the … Read more

Adobe to fix Reader hole unveiled at Black Hat

Adobe said Thursday that it will release an emergency fix the week of August 16 for a critical hole in Reader that was publicly disclosed at the Black Hat conference last week.

The flaw, which could be exploited to take control of a computer, is related to the way Adobe's PDF (portable document format) reader software handles fonts, said Charlie Miller, principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators. He disclosed the hole in his presentation on a tool that can be used to figure out the underlying bugs to software crashes, he said.

"I don't give the exploit, … Read more