The results of a hacking contest at the DEFCON conference shows that the largest U.S. corporations have a lot to learn. "If any of these targets had hired us to do a social engineering audit, we would have failed them," an organizer said. 

Google is planning to overhaul its main privacy policy in an effort to make the document more readable and usable for normal people. In addition, Google also is eliminating privacy policies for some of its individual products and services, which it deemed redundant.

The countdown to the saturation of the IPv4 address supply is now down to a matter of months: and along with the vast address space of the next-generation IPv6 architecture comes more built-in network security as well as some new potential security threats. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]

Spammers have been quick off the mark in exploiting Apple's new iTunes social network to punt survey scams. Read the full article. [The Register]

Scareware and rogue AV programs have enjoyed a very good run in the last few years, making millions of dollars for their creators and generally making life miserable for victims. And while there's been some innovation recently in the mechanisms attackers use to keep the programs resident on infected machines, researchers say that for the most part, users' lack of security savvy and laziness about updating their PCs essentially obviates the need for the use of novel techniques to make these scams work.

Mitigation has become the word of the moment at Microsoft, and the company on Thursday continued its recent flow of tools designed to lessen the effectiveness of certain attacks with the release of version 2.0 of its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit.

Heartland Payment Systems has agreed to pay $5 million to Discover to settle claims arising from the massive data breach disclosed by the payment processor last year. Read the full article. [Computerworld]

Google has released a new version of its Chrome browser and has included more than a dozen security fixes in the update. The new version, 6.0.472.53, was released two years to the day after the company pushed out the first version of Chrome.

Social networking features, a rockin' new logo and GUI improvements aren't the only reason you should upgrade to iTunes 10, says Apple. The update to Apple's popular music player software, released on Wednesday, also fixes a bunch of gaping vulnerabilities that could make earlier versions susceptible to Web based attacks.