Larry Seltzer

Pay special attention to Patch Tuesday this month. It’s the end of mainstream support for Windows XP and Office 2003. Obviously Microsoft would always want us all to move to new products quickly, but that doesn’t often happen, and they don’t make us do it. In fact, Office 2003 will be getting security updates for […]

President Obama promised in his campaign to take cybersecurity seriously and he appears to be following up on that promise. Legislation just introduced in the Senate, written with White House input according to the Washington Post, would federalize the business of computer security. It would give White House officials the power to shut off private […]

It’s April 1 (at least in some parts of the world) and the Conficker assault has begun. I’m going to assume that few, if any of us have noticed anything as a result. As a further perspective-generating measure, it might be a good idea now to note that there is a lot of real malware […]

There’s no question that Conficker is the most significant malware, and certainly the most significant worm, of the last year, and probably the last few years. It’s versatile (“blended” is the malware term), well-designed and run by what appears to be a well-organized gang. The A and B variants of the worm built up a […]

They’re calling it the first botnet designed for broadband equipment and routers, and that it is. But it’s also the first of something else: Psyb0t is the first Linux botnet. And even though it’s running on hardware devices and even though it’s running on Linux, and an obscure distribution of Linux at that, the basic […]

It’s always hard to tell just how big a threat malware is to those who are well-protected. I’ve thought for years now that if you take a number of well-known precautions and have common sense about some of the social engineering then you can feel pretty safe. This is as true as ever. Unfortunately, especially […]

The reason there is spam is because there’s money in it, or at least spammers think so. The technical reason there is spam is that the SMTP protocol used to transport e-mail on the Internet is unauthenticated. A few years ago a solution to this problem was put in place, but it doesn’t seem to […]

Not many in the security community are impressed with the BBC’s cheap trick of buying a botnet and using it to demonstrate what botnets can do. I’m as disappointed with Prevx, the security vendor who cooperated with the stunt. Despite the BBC’s assertion that no laws were broken, I’m more impressed with those who cite […]

During his campaign, President Obama promised that he would “make cyber-security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century. I’ll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset, and appoint a national cyber-adviser, who will report directly to me.” About a month ago Obama appointed Melissa Hathaway, who served as the cyber-security coordinator executive […]

When you budget time this coming Patch Tuesday (March 10) don’t forget to leave some in for the following day, March 11, when Adobe will grace us with the update to the latest zero-day vulnerability in Acrobat and its Reader program. The exploits of this vulnerability don’t appear to be widespread, but you have to […]

It was the first of the mail viruses. Melissa hit the scene in March of 1999 and seemed a little like black magic. Open an e-mail attachment, from someone you know, no less, and suddenly other people you know are getting the same e-mail. Melissa required Microsoft Office, Word and Outlook in particular, using VBA […]

I’m coming to the belief that Windows 7 is basically Vista 1.5 – a notably upgraded, but not substantially different, product. But the passage of time and “work” done by Vista has freed Windows 7 from the disrepute of its predecessor. My sense of the complaints about Vista is that the two biggest ones had […]