A week in security: Infosecurity Europe 2010

The Infosecurity Europe show in London dominated the week in security, witnessing a slew of announcements from the vendor community, as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers’ breaches survey. Elsewhere the McAfee update blunder rumbled on and a new malicious attack targeted iPad users.

The majority of security news this week undoubtedly came from the Infosecurity Europe 2010 event. Kingston unveiled a line of ultra-secure USB Flash drives for Windows PCs, certified to the US government's FIPS 140-2 Level 2 security standard, while hardware encryption firm Stonewood Group released a tool which it claims can protect shared enterprise data.

Also at the show, the ICO warned that organisations could soon be forced to report all serious data breaches to itself as part of an upcoming review of a European Union directive on the reporting of data losses. PricewaterhouseCoopers, meanwhile found that a staggering 92 per cent of large organisations have suffered a security incident or data breach in the past year, according to its biennial Information Security Breaches Survey.

Symantec timed its latest acquisition move nicely to coincide with the end of the event, snapping up privately held encryption firms PGP and GuardianEdge for a total of $370m (£242m) in cash. The security giant said that the two companies' standards-based encryption capabilities for full-disk, removable media, email, file, folder and smartphone, will perfectly complement its own endpoint security and data loss prevention tools.

Elsewhere, the McAfee update blunder story rumbled on, with the security giant finally promising to offer technical and financial assistance after releasing a faulty update file last week that crashed thousands of Windows XP SP3 systems.

Finally, Apple iPad users were warned of an email-borne threat which could give hackers unauthorised access to their affected PCs. According to BitDefender, the threat arrives via an unsolicited email urging the recipient to download the latest version of iTunes to their PCs as a prelude to updating their iPad software.