Stories by: Ellen Messmer

New legislation is putting pressure on US colleges and universities to do a better job combating illegal file-sharing -- and it's taking a toll on campus IT departments, according to research published this week.

Hackers have broken into the network of the Swiss particle-physics laboratory operating the Large Hadron Collider experiment that has just begun smashing atoms in the hope of finding the theorized Higgs particle, an elementary particle of mass.

Carnegie-Mellon University Monday announced it's making available a free add-on to Mozilla Firefox 3.0 that's intended to boost browser security.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people.

The Black Hat conference and its post-event, DefCon, promise to be a security funhouse in the coming week, as experts in Las Vegas seek to shock and amaze by poking holes in today's network technologies. The Web, wireless LANs, routers and desktop software may all look different reflected in the Black Hat/DefCon hall of mirrors, where security vendors will be revealing their hacker sides.

Open source software is a significant security risk for corporations that use it because in many cases, the open source community fails to adhere to minimal security best practices, according a study released Monday.

The unfolding cliffhanger in San Francisco this week -- in which a city network administrator has been arrested for allegedly holding the network hostage -- represents an extreme example of the insider threat that IT security vendors and others have been sounding the alarm about for years.

The Gpcode.ak virus, which encrypts files on the victim's desktop and demands a ransom to decrypt them, uses encryption that so far has proven too strong to crack. But Kaspersky Lab, which first identified Gpcode.ak earlier this month, says there is a way for most victims to at least recover their files.

Wall Street firms increasingly are buying into Linux, but some still need convincing that open source licensing and support models won't make using the technology more trouble than its worth.

Hong Kong and China are the "most dangerous" places to surf the Web based on country domain, according to McAfee's annual assessment of the riskiest and safest places in cyberspace.

A flood of SQL injection attacks on Microsoft Internet Information Servers are leaving Web pages with malicious iFrames in them, and Panda Security is urging network managers to make sure their Web pages haven't been infected.