Larry Seltzer

Software pirates are getting bolder and more sophisticated according to a new paper from Microsoft on the subject. The main study discussed in the paper is of 30 medium-sized businesses in the U.K. which were audited by a third-party review agency at Microsoft’s behest, something which the paper says happens thousands of times a year. […]

Contrary to rumors that it had been sold, Zango is now out of business. Some assets have been purchased by video search engine firm Blinkx, but the company itself has closed its doors. Formerly known as ePIPO, 180solutions and Hotbar, Zango pioneered many of the most intrusive advertising strategies on the Internet. Despite its insistence […]

Two-factor authentication is one of those computing developments that brings a clear benefit to a major problem, and which yet has had limited reach. What’s holding it back? It turns out there are a lot of factors that limit one-time password tokens. But advances in VeriSign’s VIP network should make the technology more accessible to […]

I used to scoff at social networks, but lately I find myself blowing time on Facebook and even Twitter. I’m self-employed so it’s only my own time I’m wasting, but what about your company? Many companies are doing something about social networking and probably more should be doing something about it. They’re an issue (I […]

Mikey Mooney, author of the Twitter worm, released another one Saturday night, according to security software firm F-Secure. After the first round of Twitter worms he created a week ago Mikeyy, as he was known on Twitter, said he did it out of boredom, but that he wouldn’t be upset to get a job out […]

Lots of pirates in the news lately. Some steal from shipping companies, some from content producers. All are criminals. A court in Sweden has found the four men who operated The Pirate Bay guilty of breaking copyright law. It sentenced them to a year in jail and ordered millions of dollars in restitution. The Pirate […]

A new “ransomware” threat described by Symantec uses SMS as part of the scheme. Meanwhile, according to F-Secure, the Waledac botnet is pushing fake programs that supposedly let you monitor other people’s SMS messages. The ransomware threat is in Russian and identified by Symantec as Trojan.Ransomlock. The software locks up the system and demands a […]

An article in the April issue of Virus Bulletin by two Symantec researchers says malware for the Apple Macintosh from January was used to create a botnet, and that the botnet attempted a denial-of-service attack. The malware attacks at the time were noteworthy: They hid inside what apparently pirated copies of Apple’s iWork software and […]

When Microsoft moved to new file formats for Office documents in Office 2007 it was, for the most part, an admission of the failure of the old formats. If you remember a couple years ago, there was a seemingly endless stream of zero-day attacks on Office apps based on vulnerabilities in the old file formats. […]

Not long after I wrote my column on the proposed cyber-security bills in the Senate, the actual text of the legislation became available. As I wrote at the time, my analysis was based on various other materials about the bill made public by the Commerce Committee and sponsoring senators. Now the text is available in […]

Just about everyone uses PDF files to some degree: You have to be able to read them on just about any device, and the ability to write PDFs is common in most organizations. Yet security problems with Adobe’s Acrobat and Reader programs have been fairly common and are actively exploited in the wild. One thing […]

How Adobe Reader Stacks Up to Alternatives by Larry Seltzer No Title When they call it “Reader,” they mean it. Alone among the PDF viewers in this story, Adobe’s does not let you save any changes to the document. No Title Other products touch on the use of digital signatures, but Adobe Reader has the […]