From Information Week

Spanish security researcher Ruben Santamarta has discovered a way to exploit Apple QuickTime on Microsoft Windows systems and bypass advanced security defenses to take complete control of targeted systems.

From Computer World

More than 40% of the world's spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec's MessageLabs' division.

From Dark Reading

A researcher earlier this month demonstrated how he solved Google's reCAPTCHA program even after recent improvements made to the anti-bot and anti-spam tool by the search engine giant.

From C/Net news

Intel plans to buy security company McAfee for $7.68 billion--the biggest acquisition in its 42-year history.

The chipmaker said Thursday it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy all of McAfee's common stock at $48 per share in cash. McAfee's stock closed Wednesday at $29.93, making Intel's offer a 60 percent premium.

The boards of both companies have approved the deal.

From PC World

Intel's McAfee Buy: 3 Things it Could Mean

With gloomy talk of ever-evolving security threats on the Internet, Intel announced that it's acquiring the antivirus software vendor McAfee.

McAfee will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel, so don't expect any drastic changes to the PC security software McAfee already offers. So what's the deal with this $7.68 billion acquisition? I have a few theories:

From Information Week

Georgia Tech researchers find that high-end, readily available graphics processing units are powerful enough to easily crack secret codes.

Passwords with fewer than 12 characters can be quickly brute-force decoded using a PC graphics processing unit (GPU) that costs just a few hundred dollars, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Today's top graphics processors offer about two teraflops of parallel processing power. For comparison, "in the year 2000, the world's fastest supercomputer, a cluster of linked machines costing $110 million, operated at slightly more than 7 teraflops," he said.

From Dark Reading

Most of the healthcare industry's biggest compromises could have been avoided, experts say

The number of healthcare breaches in 2010 have outpaced other verticals -- including banking and government -- by as much as threefold. While not all of these breaches came via databases, the majority of them could have been prevented through better data access and governance policies -- policies that must be enforced at the database level, experts say.

From The Register:

Anti-virus technologies may be even more ineffective than feared.

A study by web intelligence firm Cyberveillance found that, on average, vendors detect less than 19 per cent of malware attacks on the first day malware appears in the wild. Even after 30 days, detection rates improved to just 61.7 per cent, on average.

From C/Net News

Unmanned stealth plane may pick its own targets

Britain's Ministry of Defence recently unveiled an unmanned stealth attack aircraft that redefines "autopilot"--it's designed to fly halfway around the world and choose its own targets without human intervention, according to a report in The Globe and Mail.