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A conservative activist has filed a lawsuit against U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. National Security Agency after news reports that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of a large number of Verizon Communications customers.

The average cost of a data breach to an Australian enterprise increased from A$2.16 million in 2011 to $2.72 million last year, according to the Ponemon Institute's 2013 Cost of Data Breach Study.

The U.S. National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have access to servers at Google, Facebook and other major Internet services, collecting audio, video, e-mail and other content for surveillance, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Spending on cloud services is so far just a fraction of total IT spending -- roughly 3% -- but the market is growing. IT pros explain what they like about their favorite cloud-based security, storage and management services.

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), the organization that develops and maintains the widely used BIND DNS (Domain Name System) software, has patched a publicly disclosed vulnerability that can be used to remotely crash DNS servers running recent releases of BIND 9.

Any company receiving a similar order to Verizon's would have no choice but to comply to avoid serious legal consequences, experts say

The U.S. National Security Agency has been allowed by a court order to collect phone records of a large number of customers of Verizon, according to a report in the Guardian on Thursday.

Businesses that accept Bitcoins as payment risk making the transactions publicly traceable, which could get companies in trouble with government regulators, experts say.

Although U.S. government officials said the NSA's efforts to secretly collect phone records of millions of Verizon customers is nothing new, reports about its size confirmed long-standing fears among privacy and civil rights advocates.

Android smartphones and tablets are under attack, and the most popular tools developed to protect them are easily circumvented, according to new research from Northwestern University and the University of North Carolina.

A hacker released what he claims is a zero-day exploit for older versions of the Parallels Plesk Panel, a popular Web hosting administration software package, that could allow attackers to inject arbitrary PHP code and execute rogue commands on Web servers.

Three U.S. lawmakers have introduced legislation that would allow President Barack Obama's administration to deny U.S. travel visas to cyberattackers sponsored by foreign governments and to freeze their U.S.-based assets.

Law enforcement agencies in the U.S., Vietnam and the U.K. have disbanded a ring that allegedly sold online credit card details since 2007.

The number of malware samples that use P-to-P (peer-to-peer) communications has increased fivefold during the past 12 months, according to researchers from security firm Damballa.

Microsoft and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation have taken aim at a botnet network based on malware called Citadel that is held responsible for stealing people's online banking information and personal identities.

Surveys find threat costs run into six-figure losses for many, and that adware is the most pervasive menace

Microsoft's next OS update offers native fingerprint reader support

An apparently innocuous piece of malware called NetTraveler has been identified as a key component of a Chinese APT campaign that has spent the last decade stealing data from 350 organisations in 40 countries, Kaspersky Lab has found.

Apple on Tuesday updated OS X Mountain Lion, likely for one of the last times, with a combination of compatibility and reliability bug fixes as well as vulnerability patches.

Cloud budgets are rising as IT confronts security and ROI challenges, according to the 2013 Cloud Computing Survey from IDG Enterprise (free download). (Insider: Registration required)