Akamai has acquired DDoS specialist Prolexic for about $411 million (US$370 million), as part of plans to offer security products designed to protect enterprises at both the web and application layers. [ + ]

Popular crowd-funding website Kickstarter has been hacked, with attackers accessing the data - including mailing addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords - of several of the website's users. [ + ]

How hard are security companies expected to try to contact vendors before publishing reports that may cast their products in a bad light? The controversy ensuing from a report published last week by Kaspersky Lab revolves around this question. [ + ]

Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand has won a three-year, $170 million extension to its distributed computing contract with the Department of Defence. [ + ]

IT recruitment is expected to increase overall in Australia in 2014 according to a Robert Walters report, with significant variation expected between the jobs markets of different states. [ + ]

Access control solutions will continue to evolve in the coming year, including the increasing prevalence of multifactor authentication, mobile access control and NFC-based authentication. [ + ]

Around 35% of businesses polled in a survey of eight markets including Australia have adopted enterprise-wide encryption in response to consumer concerns and cyber threats. [ + ]

Dimension Data will sell its Express Data and Express Online businesses - its only distribution assets - to hardware distributor Dicker Data. [ + ]

Security researchers have uncovered a potentially nation-state-sponsored, Spanish language-based cyber threat that has been active since at least 2007. [ + ]

NBN Co's head of construction, Richard Thorpe, is leaving the organisation. Thorpe will be the third construction head to leave the company in three years. [ + ]

Cyber threats including phishing attacks and mobile malware evolved in 2013, placing Australian businesses and consumers at increasing risk of having personal and financial data stolen, according to a new report. [ + ]

Telstra has taken Optus to court over an ad that suggests little difference between the companies' mobile coverage, and has so far successfully forced Optus to remove the ad from its website. [ + ]

HP has restated Autonomy's pre-acquisition profit by 81% as part of its allegations of financial improprieties at the software company. But Autonomy's former managers claim the move may be aimed at minimising HP's UK taxes. [ + ]

Imperva has announced plans to acquire two cloud security vendors and a mainframe database auditing software company. [ + ]

Call centre operators Telco Services Australia and Trimatic Contract Services have agreed to reclassify their workers as employees and pay back pay to settle legal action from the Fair Work Ombudsman. [ + ]