What's Eating Internet Security?

TechNewsWorld, By Richard Adhikari

It's a given that hackers can and do penetrate websites with laughable ease, ranging from those of retailers to those of the United States government.

It certainly doesn't help the security-minded to know that the U.S. National Security Agency and other countries' spy agencies, including the UK's GCHQ and the West German intelligence agency, are tapping into online communications at will. In fact, the Germans have set aside US$136 million for that purpose. 

Symantec's recent admission that antivirus software is dead didn't help matters, although it only echoed what many AV experts have been saying for years and what NSS Labs has pointed to in various reports over the last several years.

Microsoft's July Patch Tuesday may have been relatively light, but the company's June Patch Tuesday contained almost 60 remote execution flaws in the six versions of Internet Explorer and the components that render fonts on PCs, and one of the IE bug reports tackled was more than 180 days old, Kurt Baumgartner, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, pointed out. Read more.