Security professionals lack confidence that political parties will do anything to improve cyber security, according to a survey by security firm Proofpoint.

Fresh from releasing a range of encrypted drive kits at last week's Infosecurity Europe show, Origin Storage says that the steady stream of advances in brute force decryption techniques – which started when Russia's Elcomsoft released the first versions of its Password Recovery suite of 'utilities' around 18 months ago – means that laptop users must now raise their game when it comes to encryption.

Fresh from its security problems of earlier in the week when members' chat sessions were visible to third-party users, Facebook has come under fire for allegedly installing applications on users' Facebook areas by stealth.

Research just released claims to show that China, the US and the Russian Federation contributed 49% of all web-based threats reported in April 2010.

A newly released survey from (ISC)² shows that federal CISOs are avoiding cloud computing applications due to concerns about replicating IT security policy in the cloud.

Social networking giant Facebook temporarily shut down its live chat service this week, after a security flaw caused the site to begin showing some users' chat messages to their other contacts.

A North Carolina man has been accused of trying to hack into an automated teller machine and change its password, according to a complaint filed by the FBI.

A USB drive that contained the medical records of patients and personal information on NHS staff was apparently lost by a member of staff of a secure medical unit in Scotland, and has turned up in a supermarket car park.

VeriSign has released a report that seeks to assist online businesses and other enterprises in protecting themselves against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Two pump and dump scammers were convicted by a federal jury this week. G. David Gordon and Richard Clark, both of Tulsa, Oklahoma, will be sentenced for stock trading offenses committed between 2004 and 2006.

Cybercriminals are selling fake and stolen accounts on social networking site Facebook in bulk in the underground economy, according to security researchers.

Businesses are pumping information security investment into all the wrong areas, research has revealed.