Security

Huawei, the embattled Chinese telecom equipment company, is reaching out to a security researcher in Germany for a little help.

The company's global security chief, John Suffolk, told Reuters in an interview published today that Huawei has dispatched engineers to Germany to meet with Felix "FX" Lindner and go over the security flaws he has found in a host of its products.

According to Reuters, which spoke with Lindner earlier this month, Huawei products ranging from a cheap home router to major telecom equipment appear to be vulnerable to hacking. Lindner stopped short of saying a backdoor … Read more

Need to shut down your PC in a hurry? Simple. Here are two handy keyboard shortcuts to save you time and mousing.

Close all open programs A little-known set of keystrokes will shut down all active programs at once in no time.

Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and then Alt-T to open Task Manager's Applications tab. Press the down arrow, and then Shift-down arrow to select all the programs listed in the window. When they're all selected, press Alt-E, then Alt-F, and finally x to close Task Manager.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's seven steps that … Read more

If you live in South Carolina, there's a very good chance that slipshod state government security has allowed an overseas computer criminal to acquire your Social Security number.

The South Carolina Department of Revenue acknowledged the massive electronic security breach today, saying an electronic intrusion led to 3.6 million Social Security numbers being stolen. The state's population is approximately 4.7 million.

"We are taking immediate steps to protect the taxpayers of South Carolina, including providing one year of credit monitoring and identity protection to those affected," Gov. Nikki Haley said in a statement.

Anyone … Read more

Huawei has offered to give the Australian government "unrestricted" access to the firm's software source code and hardware equipment in an effort to dispel security fears, months after the Chinese telecoms giant was barred from supplying infrastructure equipment for the country's national broadband network.

The Australian government barred Huawei from bidding on contracts for the network earlier this year, saying it had a "a responsibility to do our utmost to protect [the network's] integrity and that of the information carried on it".

John Lord, Huawei's Australian chairman, said on Thursday that the … Read more

Microsoft has settled a lawsuit with a Russian software programming who admits he wrote the code used for malware that infected 41,000 computers worldwide, according to today's blog post from Richard Domingues Boscovich, an assistant general council for Microsoft.

The case centered around the Kelihos botnet, a series of infected computers that Microsoft said was able to send 3.8 billion spam e-mails per day before the company stopped it last September. While programmer Andrey N. Sabelnikov admits to writing the code, he was not the operator of the botnet and was not involved in those activities, according … Read more

The Federal Trade Commission is offering a cash reward of $50,000 to whoever develops a solution to block robotic calling on both landlines and mobiles.

In 2009, the FTC banned automatic commercial telemarketing calls -- but solicitation is still a problem as advanced technology makes illegal, irritating calls more difficult to block.

The FTC Robocall Challenge site says that anyone who wants to take on the war with robo-marketeers can submit their idea from October 25 to January 17.

The FTC is asking these basic questions: does it work? Is it easy to use? And can it be rolled … Read more

Ally Financial is experiencing some odd traffic issues that have prompted some to wonder if there's more there than meets the eye.

In a statement to CNET today, an Ally Financial spokeswoman confirmed that the company has witnessed some unusual activity across its site, but so far, no major issues have erupted.

"Ally has seen some unusual traffic on our Web site, which we continue to monitor; however, we have not experienced the type of disruption that has been associated with the denial of service attacks," the spokeswoman told CNET in an e-mailed statement. "There has … Read more

India has surpassed the U.S. and taken the lead as the greatest spam-sending country in the world. One out of every six junk messages that litter users' e-mail inboxes are coming from India, according to a new report from SophosLabs.

The security vendor's third-quarter "Dirty Dozen" report of spam-relaying countries found that India upped its percentage of global spam for the third quarter in a row and now accounts for more than 16 percent of all junk e-mails.

What is important to note, however, is that this spam doesn't necessarily come directly from India's … Read more

Seventy-seven percent of small- and medium-sized businesses believe that their companies are safe from cyberthreats and yet 83 percent of them have no formal cybersecurity plan. Um, yeah. And that was just one of the contradictions uncovered in a survey of 1,015 small- and medium-sized businesses carried out by the National Cyber Security Alliance and Symantec.

"It's not part of the culture yet," said Michael Kaiser, executive director of the NCSA, who added that he was "a little disheartened that we didn't see substantial … Read more