Security

The breach of Sony's PlayStation Network will cost the company at least US$171 million according to the company's preliminary financial forecast released on Monday -- the latest predictions for its fiscal year ending March 2012. The total figure will likely grow. . . and grow. Sony has racked up exp...

Information technology providers and politicians on both sides of the aisle are applauding the Obama administration for wading into the complex issue of cybersecurity. The administration issued its package of Internet security legislative proposals last week, spurring hopes that the U.S. Congress wo...

The cloud-based storage system Dropbox is the most recent online provider to be criticized for misleading customers in terms of of privacy and security, according to an FTC complaint. Dropbox deceived customers by making them believe that its employees did not have access to their data, alleges Chr...

Sony's PlayStation Network has been rebuffed in the company's home country. The game-maker relaunched the troubled online service elsewhere around the world, but it has been blocked in Japan by government order. Japan wants Sony to implement further preventive security measures and make more progres...

A key element in the shifting political winds in Washington is a call for less business regulation, especially from the conservative wing of the now ascendant Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. But one leading Republican last week tossed that mantra aside and launched into a t...

The hackers who penetrated Sony's PlayStation Network, Qriosity music service and Sony Online Entertainment are planning to launch another major attack against the company this weekend, according to a reader of an Internet Relay Chat channel used by the hackers. The hackers claim to have access to S...

Most of the talk about protecting users' privacy on the Web has centered on preventing the collection of information that would aid companies in creating targeted ad campaigns. I appreciate the efforts of all those people -- from the myriad consumer watchdog groups to former presidential candidates ...

The Obama administration has come up with a proposal for both improving and simplifying identity protection for consumers using the Internet, computers, and mobile devices. The plan would greatly reduce the need for consumers to use and remember multiple passwords or fill out separate privacy forms ...

The closer you look, the uglier it gets. More evidence about the Sony hacking has emerged. Apparently, Sony Online Entertainment was part of the target when the Sony PlayStation Network was hacked. SOE handles online multilayer games. The SOE hacking was part of the Sony breach in mid-April that le...

Sony confirmed that its recent site outages were caused by compromised security in a blog post on Tuesday. Between April 17 and 19, hackers gained access to PlayStation Network and Qriocity user account information, the company revealed, and its shutdown of PSN and Qriocity on April 20 was a reactio...

Sony Entertainment has reached a settlement with George Hotz, aka "GeoHot," the hacker who jailbroke Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console. The settlement was reached on March 31, according to a Sony blog post. The terms were not fully disclosed, but Hotz has apparently agreed to a permanent injunctio...

The world's largest permission-based marketing firm, Epsilon, reported on Friday that its computer system was hacked and an unspecified number of email addresses and names were stolen. Epsilon sends around 40 billion emails a year on behalf of its 2,500 clients, which include major banks such as Cap...

Microsoft and federal law enforcement agents have taken down the Rustock botnet, which had about a million infected computers under its control. The botnet was officially considered offline on Wednesday, according to Microsoft. A botnet consists of an infrastructure of computers that have been hacke...

A coalition of information technology and civil liberties organizations is trying to get ahead of congressional lawmakers and the Obama administration in forging a national cybersecurity policy. Members of the coalition met with congressional staffers last week to brief them on the group's just-rele...

More and more, we are seeing tablets and smartphones becoming integral to user access. Coupled with the ever-increasing burden of managing or even seeking to lower storage costs, this has become a major challenge for IT departments. Public cloud storage -- also known as "Storage as a Service" -- mak...