Mounting backlash against National Security Agency spying practices is now coming from sources as varied as security expert Bruce Schneier, former Reagan-era budget director David Stockman and high-level representatives of European countries.

Start-up CrowdStrike today made available its first product, called Falcon, designed to detect and block stealthy infiltrations of Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh-based endpoint machines and servers.

Security monitoring -- the type involving traditional security information and event management (SIEM) -- can be done in some public Cloud environments, according to Gartner. And if you're using public Cloud services, it's time to think about doing it.

When it comes to information security, there are a lot of "misperceptions" and "exaggerations" about both the threats facing businesses and the technologies that might be used to protect their important data assets, according to Gartner analyst, Jay Heiser.

Adm. Mike Mullen, U.S. Navy (retired), called the leaks coming from former CIA employee Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency's role in intelligence collection a "huge breach" that undermines the country's security.

Enterprises are under heavy pressure to change their approach to IT security because of a "nexus of forces" that include big data, social networking, mobile and cloud computing, according to Gartner.

Debate continues to rage today over the bombshell revelations that the National Security Agency collects intelligence on individuals via telecommunications and social-networking sites. The uproar has the U.S. government and private companies admitting to some aspects of the surveillance, while vehemently denying others. A former CIA agent working for Booz Allen Hamilton has revealed himself as the leaker.

IBM is conducting research that involves making use of the open Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in a cloud-based setting as a way to provide dynamic services, especially to mobile devices.

Does the world need another operating system? Yes, according to the creative minds in the computer science department at the University of California at Berkeley, which have come up with one called the Tessellation Operating System that's intended to light up the future of the Internet of things.

The Design Automation Conference (DAC) held here this week celebrated its 50th anniversary, prompting the industry and academic community that poured so much energy into chip, software and hardware design to both take a look back and to predict what the future may hold.

Security for medical equipment such as MRI machines to and pacemakers is woeful, even though these devices today connect to networks and sometimes face risks from malware or hacking, according to a panel of university researchers speaking at this week's Design Automation Conference.

The smartphone of the future is going to require a "revolution" in thinking about technical design and "not enough people are prepared" for the challenges coming in here years, the president of Samsung Electronics said in his keynote at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) here today.

The popular services of Google, Facebook and Twitter are improving in terms of security, says Scott Behrens, head of Neohapsis Labs, which took a security snapshot of them on May 28 through an analysis that included looking at server headers sent during responses to the websites.

PayPal this week kicked off a global software-coding competition called Battle Hack, challenging software developers to devise on their own a socially useful application that makes use of PayPal payment processing. The grand prize: $100,000.

A Gartner report about the security software market shows that No. 2 ranked McAfee enjoyed the most overall growth last year, Trend Micro slipped but stayed No. 3, and Symantec held onto its top spot with 19.6 per cent of the $US19.1 billion market.