Security

Correction on June 13: The spelling of Johnathan Nightingale has been fixed.

On Wednesday, Mozilla announced next Tuesday, June 17, as "Download Day" for Firefox 3. The company also released Firefox 3 release candidate 3 as a final step toward full release.

With Firefox 3, Mozilla is attempting to set a Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of software downloads within a 24-hour period. There is currently no Guinness Book record for that accomplishment.

Firefox 3 includes a new rendering engine, so pages load faster. It also uses fewer system resources, addressing a complaint in … Read more

Opera 9.5, code-named Kestrel, on Thursday became available for download for Windows and Mac.

The new version of the browser, whose release candidate was released earlier this week, is a security-enhanced version of Opera 9. It includes antiphishing protection from Netcraft and malware protection from Haute Secure, as well as support for Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer (EV SSL).

The browser also has a new "eurotechno" look and feel, a QuickFind address bar feature, better synchronization with its mobile cousin, and a Speed Dial feature for visually bookmarking nine of your favorite sites.

Scandinavia-based Opera Software still … Read more

On Wednesday, Verizon Business released a four-year study concluding that 9 out of 10 corporate data breaches could have been prevented, had appropriate security measures been taken. The Verizon report includes the results of more than 500 forensic investigations, including three of the largest data breaches ever reported.

Meanwhile, the Identity Theft Resource Center released its 2007 report on identity theft, offering comparisons to data it's collected over the last five years.

Verizon found that 73 percent of the data breaches were the result of outside sources, with only 18 percent from insider threats. Of the outside sources, 39 … Read more

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PDT on Wednesday with links to the newly debuted release candidate.

If you were planning to host a Firefox 3 launch party this week, keep that bubbly on ice a bit longer.

Mozilla on Wednesday released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3. Windows and Linux users won't likely feel a thing; the new browser is considered stable on those platforms.

The extra release candidate addresses some lingering issues on the Mac OS X operating system. The changes are internal.

The previous test version, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2, can also be downloaded for Windows, … Read more

Microsoft on Tuesday released its June 2008 security bulletin, which includes three critical, three important, and one moderate patch.

Of the critical, one is for the Bluetooth stack in Windows XP and Windows Vista, one is for DirectX, and another is a cumulative update to Internet Explorer. The one moderate bulletin covers a flaw in the speech recognition feature in Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Vista. Of the important bulletins, one concerns Active Directory and another Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM). All Microsoft security patches for both Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update or via the individual bulletins … Read more

On Friday, Internet movie database IMDB fell victim to a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that coincided with Amazon.com being offline, says one researcher.

Soups Ranjan, a senior member of the technical staff of network protection and management company Narus, said in a blog that he found evidence that at least one of the IP addresses used by IMDB fell under a sustained DDoS attack between 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. PDT Friday.

"My attempt to load the IMDB page via a direct connection to the Web server under attack (http://72.21.206.… Read more

On Friday Opera announced that version 9.5 of the browser (download Opera 9.5 beta for Windows or Mac) will include built-in antimalware protection from Haute Secure (download for Windows 32-bit or Windows 64-bit).

This is, of course, to counter the antimalware protection built into Firefox 3, currently available as a final release candidate (download for Windows or Mac). Firefox uses data from Google and StopBadware to block a site before it loads on your browser.

Haute Secure counters that its offering is better because it relies upon a community of dedicated users to inform the product when to … Read more

Microsoft is planning seven security bulletins for its Patch Tuesday this month, the company announced Thursday.

Three of the bulletins are deemed critical by Microsoft, and cover Bluetooth, Internet Explorer, and DirectX. The Internet Explorer bulletin is expected to be cumulative and might include some remediation for the Safari for Windows vulnerability disclosed last month by Nitesh Dhanjani.

Three of the bulletins are termed important, and cover WINS, Active Directory, and PGM. One of the bulletins is considered moderate and covers kill bits.

The bulletins will be released on Tuesday.

As a follow-up to last week's story on Hotmail users getting locked out, the second account mentioned has been restored.

Last Wednesday, Hotmail account holder Will showed CNET an e-mail verifying that he notified Microsoft on May 2 that his Hotmail password had been changed without his knowledge. Microsoft support staff responded with the following message: "Thank you for your message to MSN and Windows Live Privacy. I understand you are having difficulties accessing your MSN Hotmail account because you believe someone has gained unauthorized access to your account. For assistance with this issue, please contact the MSN … Read more