Unsurprisingly, complexity in network security environments, particularly multi-vendor environments, yields risk, according to a new survey. And yet, manual processes and a lack of consolidation across operations is still the norm even as IT departments add more and more vendors, devices and firewall rules. This creates a gap between the capacity of the IT staff to manage systems and the rate of their proliferation.

Earlier this month there was much discussion in leading UK national newspapers about a proposal to allow the use of social media credentials to access government websites. This was confirmed by the Government Digital Service blog, which has promised more details in the next few weeks.

Google is plotting ways to implement a client-side solution to prevent rogue apps from being downloaded from Google Play, the Android application store, according to an analysis.

Spyware families are propagating, with the latest identified spawn being miniFlame, a “small and highly flexible malicious program” suitable for targeted, in-depth cyber espionage operations, according to Kaspersky Lab.

The ISO has released a brand-new cyber-security standard aimed at ensuring the safety of online transactions and personal information exchanged over the internet, including e-commerce, online banking, virtual medical records, remote office applications and more.

Wannabe code-crackers have a fresh challenge to rise to, if DeTron has its way. The encryption company ran a full page ad in the New York Times late last week challenging code breakers, hackers and cryptographers to crack a message encrypted by Quantum Direct Key (QDK) – a personal identification encryption technology aimed at eliminating multiple passwords for cloud services and web apps.

In an effort to make the evaluation of security resilience and risk reduction strategies more accessible, the Information Security Forum (ISF) has launched a “Benchmark as a Service” (BaaS) tool, for real-time benchmarking via the cloud.

The first public indication of the loss appeared on the California Attorney General website, with the publication of a sample ‘notification’ letter now being sent to the bank’s affected customers.

The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has summarized both the risks and opportunities in the ‘consumerization of IT’, the business trend that includes BYOD.

Cryptography Research (CRI) has published its investigation into the random number generator used by the Intel Ivy Bridge processor, the processor that is likely to be used by the majority of new PCs and laptops now and for the immediate future.

Firefox 16 was released on Tuesday, pulled from the download page on Wednesday, and replaced with Firefox 16.0.1 on Thursday. The main cause was that Tuesday’s version introduced a new critical bug that was fixed by Thursday.

A new malicious email campaign pretends to be from CNN. It announces breaking news – Mitt Romney is ‘almost president’. But it leads to a Blackhole exploit site.