Larry Seltzer

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 […]

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 […]