Larry Seltzer

Windows users have to look at the Internet as a source of unending attacks. You can defend yourself with some software and some common sense, and the defenses are set to get even better. There are two basic popular types of malware infection these days: the Trojan horse program marketed through links in an e-mail […]

I’m a fan of EV SSL. Like a lot of security technologies, it’s far from being a silver bullet, but it’s helpful. It’s also, perhaps, harder to implement than it may at first seem. EV SSL is short for Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer, and refers to a special class of x.509 digital certificate particularly […]

Here’s the short version of how this story begins: A couple of weeks ago I spilled coffee into my ThinkPad. Yes, I’m a klutz, and it was all my fault, even though I was stressed out. Amazingly, the notebook continued to run and most of the keys still worked. I immediately started a full system […]

Microsoft’s April Patch Day disclosed serious vulnerabilities and important patches to the operating system, but in the long term I think the most interesting one was MS08-023-Security Update of ActiveX Kill Bits. This update addresses two vulnerabilities by setting three “kill bits” in the registry for those controls, disabling them. Two are Microsoft controls that […]

Reports continue about the sort of espionage I discussed recently in “The Secret China-US Hacking War.” This Wired Report mentions how pro-Tibet groups have been the target of many such attacks, and it goes into more detail on the attacks themselves. In 2006 and 2007, there were a series of attacks against Microsoft Office users, […]

German scientists have cracked the KeeLoq system, which is the cryptography used in RFID-based remote devices, including car remotes from Volvo, Honda, Toyota and Volkswagen. At first glance this seems like a catastrophe for owners of those cars (I own two Hondas myself). And make no mistake, if the report is true, it exposes great […]

The issue of how to manage legal evidence discovery in the age of electronic data will be prominently aired during the RSA Conference April 7-12 in San Francisco. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola of the United States District Court, D.C. Circuit, will be speaking on emerging issues in electronic discovery and digital evidence and their […]

Like eWEEK Channel Insider Technology Editor Frank Ohlhorst, I’m basically enthusiastic for and optimistic about NAC. NAC is a generic use of the name for Cisco’s Network Access Control. It has come to be used for the entire approach to qualifying endpoints before they gain access to a network. As Ohlhorst says, the two big […]

It was one security embarrassment after another for Apple the week of March 24. It began at the CanSecWest show, where the annual hacker contest challenged attendees to compromise a Vista system, a Ubuntu Linux system and a MacBook Air. The first day was reserved for preauthentication attacks and would have netted $20,000, but nobody […]

Prepare to be stunned: There is offensive material on the Web. Some of it is obscene, some violent, some racist. Oh well, it’s a free country, right? Well, sort of. It wasn’t so free for Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has been in the news lately for a controversial film he intends to produce. The […]

TRUSTe is a nonprofit organization set up to help Internet users determine who is worthy of their trust, in commerce or other areas on the Web. The company sells a number of seals that you might see when interacting with Web sites. These seals are meant to show that the site adheres to TRUSTe’s standards […]

I used to cover the CPU business, writing analysis of industry developments. Since the early ’90s, when most of the major RISC architectures began to gel, the main creative task of processor designers has been to inject more parallelization into design. First there was superscalar execution, in which multiple execution units allow more than one […]