Larry Seltzer

Is the United States under attack again? Recent reports have the U.S. military not quite blaming the Chinese military for a long string of cyber-attacks against U.S. military computers. It sure sounds like they believe it, but they’re not quite saying it. Also left unsaid is how much actual damage and compromise has happened already. […]

Business decisions are already dominated by legal considerations in many fields. This will come as no surprise to you, I’m sure, but things are getting worse, especially for corporate IT. Big legal changes have been happening over the last few years with respect to the use of digital evidence in legal proceedings. Digital evidence is […]

Physical security attacks are all the rage these days. Two attacks have been described recently that purport to break the physical security of systems with what was thought to be state of the art protection. The first one, from a couple weeks ago, involves attacking notebook computers in “sleep” mode. Modern operating system such as […]

Back when the CAN-SPAM act was passed, there were those who complained about various provisions in it. There have been prosecutions under it, but for the most part it’s been a great legal irrelevancy. This sort of situation is the best we can hope for from Senate bill 2661, “The Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of […]

EV-SSL certificates have been available for about a year. The absolute numbers of them are low, but the growth rate looks good on a line graph and it’s not like everyone is supposed to have them. They’re a good thing I think, although they’re less about combating phishing than inspiring confidence in genuine sites. VeriSign […]

A recent Newsweek cover story called Pakistan “the most dangerous country in the world.” The writers don’t even know the half of it. A few days ago, YouTube’s service was interrupted for a couple of hours over a political issue in Pakistan. Someone in the government was offended by a video on YouTube. They issued […]

Where does all the time go? It’s been five years since I began writing these columns. I thought it would be interesting to look back and see how much things have really changed. In my inaugural column, I stated my philosophy that it stunk that people had to waste time and money on computer security, […]

If you run a Web site-let’s say a storefront-that manages user information, you need to authenticate your users. It’s dangerous business, but you have to do it and you have to do it well. Screwing up could ruin your reputation. And yet you’re also part of a big problem for users: the proliferation of IDs. […]

One-time password tokens of the type made famous by RSA have been securing enterprise networks for many years. In the consumer space they have been a complete dud, but because of work under development for some time, there’s a decent chance that could change. The point of these tokens is to provide two-factor authentication. In […]

Some time ago I wrote somewhere about Geoff Huston and his projections for the depletion of what remains in the IPv4 address pool. I was intrigued by his work and suggested to him that there were a lot of wasteful class A addresses out there, and perhaps they could be reallocated to better purpose. A […]

The declining practicality of the anti-malware business is an old story; one day it’s got to collapse under the weight of its technical model. Can it be saved in time? During the week of Feb. 4, several vendors and testing organizations announced the formation of the AMTSO (Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization), which is dedicated to […]

I’ve long been a fan of software as a service, and specifically of hosted e-mail security, and even more specifically of Postini. It’s just the right way to do this sort of thing. Now Postini, acquired about six months ago by Google, is offering a new set of security services bundles. They’re good stuff, just […]