Hackers continue to launch attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in Oracle’s Java software in record numbers, Microsoft said Monday.

Citing research from a recent report, Tim Rains, a director in the company’s Trustworthy Computing group, said that up to half of all attacks detected and blocked by Microsoft’s security software over a 12-month period were Java exploits.

Altogether, Microsoft stopped more than 27 million Java exploits from mid-2010 through mid-2011.

Most of those exploits targeted long-ago-patched vulnerabilities, said Rains.
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Research In Motion is taking on mobile device management for Android and Apple iOS devices as well as its own products, introducing the BlackBerry Mobile Fusion product on Tuesday.

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion is designed to simplify the management of phones and tablets that run RIM’s current BlackBerry OS and the emerging BBX platform, which is based on the QNX software that currently powers RIM’s PlayBook tablet. But Mobile Fusion will also manage devices using the two biggest mobile OSes, Android and iOS.
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Advanced Micro Devices’ first branded desktop system memory modules, called AMD Memory, will be available in North America through major retailers, the company said Monday.

By offering its own branded memory modules for desktops, AMD aims to “take the guesswork out of DRAM selection, providing an easy and straightforward experience when looking for the ideal match for gaming or multimedia PC needs“, it said in a statement.

AMD has been supplying and validating memory for AMD Radeon graphics cards for several years, and saw an opportunity to add system memory to its product line, AMD said.
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A yet-to-be-patched flaw discovered in the Apache HTTP server allows attackers to access protected resources on internal networks if some rewrite rules are not defined properly.

The vulnerability affects Apache installations that operate in reverse proxy mode, a type of configuration used for load balancing, caching and other operations that involve the distribution of resources over multiple servers.

In order to set up Apache HTTPD to run as a reverse proxy, server administrators use specialized modules like mod_proxy and mod_rewrite.
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Struggling network infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks is planning to cut 17,000 jobs worldwide, as it aims to cut ¬1 billion (US$1.35 billion) from its annual costs by the end of 2013, the company said Wednesday.

About 23 percent of the company’s 74,000 employees will be laid off. The 4 1/2-year-old joint venture between Nokia and Siemens has been struggling to compete with Swedish Ericsson and Chinese vendor Huawei. Parent company Nokia’s ongoing problems have made Nokia Siemens’ situation even more difficult.
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Three Republican presidential candidates at Tuesday’s CNN-sponsored GOP debate said that cyberattacks pose an emerging national security threat to the United States.

In closing comments during the debate, GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, said that he views cyberattacks as one of three major security threats the U.S. is currently unprepared to deal with.

Prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — and even today — the biggest threat to the U.S is the use of a weapon of mass destruction in an American city, Gingrich said. “The second is an electromagnetic pulse attack, which would literally destroy the country’s capacity to function,” and the third is a cyberattack.
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Google continues to shut down underperforming services, announcing Tuesday that Friend Connect, Knol and a few other services will soon go the way of Google Health and Google Buzz.

“We’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward,” Urs Holzle, senior vice president of operations at Google, wrote in a blog post.

Friend Connect may be the most high-profile of the services to shut down. Google said it is “retiring” the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1.
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