Security Strategy, Plan, Budget

Sophos, maker of anti-malware solutions, has partnered with bit.ly, a utility for shortening, sharing and tracking links, to provide visibility into infected websites through its behavior detection capabilities, search engine partnerships and anti-spam honeypots.

Apple on Tuesday pushed out an iPhone and iPod Touch security update.

The risk of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure systems is rising and respondents to a new McAfee survey suspect a major incident is coming -- one that may cost millions and result in loss of life.

Cybercriminals have launched a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) campaign exploiting the interest surrounding Apple's newly released tablet computer, iPad, according to researchers at web security vendor Websense. Searches for "apple tablet announcement" have been poisoned by attackers and now yield a malicious link within the top five search results for site promoting rogue anti-virus products. Other recent SEO campaigns have leveraged the crisis in Haiti, the movie "Avatar" and Google's new Nexus One smartphone. - AM

Bruce Rutherford of MasterCard was named chairperson today of The PCI Security Standards Council, an organization that drives education and awareness of the PCI Data Security Standard and other best practices to increase payment data security. In the position, Rutherford, who is group head, fraud management solutions, payment system integrity at MasterCard, is charged with increasing adoption of the PCI standards and to refine the next version. - GM

A new Ponemon Institute study found that the number of data breaches caused by malicious attacks and botnets doubled last year, compared to 2008.

Compliance management vendor Trustwave announced on Tuesday the acquisition of data encryption vendor BitArmor. Trustwave plans to integrate BitArmor's file- and full-disk encryption technology into its current data leakage prevention and endpoint security solution to help clients comply with regulations that are increasing the demand for encryption. Meanwhile, Symantec on Tuesday announced plans to buy Gideon Technologies, provider of IT risk automation, to better serve public-sector customers. Terms of both deals were not disclosed. — AM