The FBI is in the early stages of developing an application that would monitor sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as various news feeds, in order to find information on emerging threats and new events happening at the moment. The tool would give specialists the ability to pull the data into a dashboard that also would include classified information that's coming in at the same time.

Security researchers have seen attackers going after the newly patched CVE-2012-0003 vulnerability in the Windows Media Player. The flaw, which was patched earlier this month by Microsoft, is a critical one that can enable remote code execution, and it affects a wide range of Windows systems.

Spammers are cashing in on the (modest) popularity of Google+ by sending out fake emails inviting users to try out Google+ Hangouts by downloading a malicious file posing as a Google+ Hangout plug-in.

A Hawaiian legislator has introduced a broadly worded data-retention bill that require ISPs and other service providers to retain their customers' Internet activity records for at least two years. The bill, introduced by state Rep. John Mizuno, does not have any provisions for exclusions or privacy considerations and would force the ISPs to hold the customer data, but it does not make any mention of how the data should be protected.

VIEW SLIDESHOW Scenes from S4 2012

S4 is a conference hosted by Digital Bond, a security consulting firm based in Sunrise, Florida. Now in its fifth year, the S4 draws some of the world's top experts in securing industrial control systems to sunny Miami Beach to discuss the state of the art.

Google announced Tuesday that it will revamp its privacy policy and terms of service, boiling more than 60 privacy policies down to one comprehensive document that will extend across most of their products.

Trojan downloaders are the cannon fodder of the malware world: expendable, commoditized foot soldiers with a single function. Once their job is complete--downloading the executable or other malicious component--the downloaders are no longer useful. However, researchers have found that there are now some pieces of malware that are downloading not explicitly malicious pieces of code, but small bits of code that are benign on their face, but are then transformed into malicious instructions once they're on the target machine.

Researchers have found a string of weaknesses in the WordPress default installation page, including PHP code execution and a persistent cross-site scripting flaw, affecting versions 3.3.1 and later. WordPress officials say that they're not planning to fix the vulnerabilities as there's only a small possibility of exploitation by attackers.

The New York State Public Service Commission announced yesterday they'll be looking into a data breach that may have exposed the personal information of almost two million customers to unknown attackers.

In what may become a precedent setting digital rights ruling, Judge Robert Blackburn of the United States District Court of Colorado ruled that compelling an individual to provide access to the encrypted contents of a device does not violate the US Constitution's prohibition of self incrimination.