Larry Seltzer

Has the malware problem gotten out of control? An aggressive test of anti-virus products indicates that it has, at least by some measures. Its a tough call. I worry less and less personally about malware, even though Im barraged by it day and night. Ive got a gateway security device that scans for it with […]

I must say Im surprised at the flood of mail I got from my last column, which suggested that ISPs get more aggressive about security. Ill be following it up after I do some more research, but something a vendor said to me recently was both interesting and related. The vendors argument was that consumer […]

The role of ISPs in security is one of the great neglected topics in our industry, and one of my favorite subjects back to the time before I started focusing on security. Back, I believe, in 1999, I wrote an article predicting (because it made perfect sense) that the future of security for consumers was […]

In August 2004 an innovative phishing attack was launched, not against the usual targets of PayPal and large banks, but against the Kerry for President campaign. The campaign fought back against it, also in an innovative way. Typical of phishing attacks, the e-mail and Web site linked directly to images on the Kerry campaign site […]

Its hardly surprising that privacy and security advocates have raised concerns ever since the State Department announced that passports would soon include RFID technology. Some people are ready to oppose anything the government does. But they have a point. These passports, which the government began distributing in August, contain an RFID chip which transmits all […]

Why would a company need to point out that its philosophy is anti-evil? Google seems to be overcompensating in this statement, especially in as much as its given definition of non-evilness amounts to providing relevant advertising on a Web page. That sounds like “competence” to me. A more relevant question regarding “evil” would be about […]

Recently I got an ad for a 2GB USB flash key for $29.99 (after rebate) and saw an announcement of a 16GB key in the works. 16GB! Its not too long ago that such capacities were stunning even for hard disks. Pretty soon youll get a key like that in your box of Rice Krispies. […]

There was a time, not quite ten years ago, when many serious people expected Java to be the dominant computing platform of the future. The technology business is overflowing with similar stories of products that received inordinate attention for a time, only to fade when real decision making came along. One of my favorites is […]

The anti-spyware business has a chip on its shoulder and its hard to blame them, especially with people like me arguing that their whole category of product is, or should be, superfluous. Lately there has been some controversy over testing practices for spyware. Shortly after the controversy over Consumer Reports anti-virus tests peaked, Alex Eckelberry […]

Jose Nazario, blogmaster of the Worm Blog, noticed something interesting about the recent MS06-040 vulnerability. This was one of those very worst kinds of vulnerabilities: accessible through a network interface and capable of executing attack code on the remote system. Many of the most severe examples of worms, and the most famous examples of malware, […]

Early in August someone on Circle ID noted that a wildcard entry had been added to the .cm country domain, which is the TLD (top-level domain) for the West African nation of Cameroon. Cameroon? Who cares, you may be thinking. But a wildcard entry in the DNS (Domain Name System) for a TLD lets the […]

The anti-virus community is abuzz in controversy over the tests performed recently by Consumer Reports on anti-virus products. CR went out and did what many of us have considered in the past, but not actually done: With the help of consultants at ISE (Independent Security Evaluators), they created a test bed of 5,500 new viruses […]