Stories about: Ariel

The 12th Black Hat conference convened at Caesar's Palace last week, where the 4,500 attendees (a 12.5 per cent increase over last year) heard about the security problems that will plague virtualized environments, why Cisco routers are more of a hacker target than ever and a detailed explanation of DNS attacks.

The Cisco hacking scene has been pretty quiet for the past three years, but at this week's Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas, there's going to be a little noise.

Black Hat kicks off this week in Las Vegas with a big shift in focus from Internet viruses to application security.

After 50 years, the useful life of the hard disk drive (HDD) is increasingly being threatened by SDRAM and flash-based semiconductor solid state disk (SSD) storage. For example, Samsung Electronics Company has announced plans to release a 64GB solid state disk drive in a 2.5-in. form factor with an IDE/ATA or Serial ATA interface. And current 32GB flash memory is selling for US$1,800 or less. So the questions are, Is SSD ready to surpass HDD in capacity and price? And, Has the HDD reached the physical limits or can the technology be pushed further?

Linux vendors are issuing patches for several serious bugs affecting an imaging component, a pdf viewer, two widely used media players and the Shoutcast audio server.