Larry Seltzer

The evidence that Windows Vista is far more secure than Windows XP, both in theory and in practice, is abundant. With new features and standards, Microsoft hopes to make Windows 7 even more secure, especially for enterprises. A paper on the company’s Technet site explores several new security features in Windows 7, most of which […]

An unsubstantiated report claims that a successful DNS cache poisoning attack was conducted recently against Banco Bradesco, a Brazilian bank. The reports are in Portuguese. This Google translation explains it in typically clumsy, broken English. The actual DNS cache belonged to Brazilian ISP NET Virtua. DNS cache poisoning is an attack against DNS servers, usually […]

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 […]