Larry Seltzer

In the heat of a malware outbreak there is usually a lot of confusion about what variant of what worm is involved? Is it just a new variant or a completely new worm? Inconsistencies between vendors about variant indices and virus names add to the confusion. The latest effort to address this problem is the […]

Its America, so it was inevitable. Adware and spyware vendors have ended up in court, and the plaintiffs are seeking class certification. It started several months ago with a suit against DirectRevenue. Now another suit has been filed against 180Solutions (details here in PDF form) for similar reasons. 180Solutions, aka MetricsDirect, has a long and […]

Jaded old jerks like me who are skeptical of everything dont need anti-phishing software. I dont trust anyone, let alone some vendor sending me an e-mail. But anti-phishing software is definitely a good thing, and I have high hopes for it. I tested several anti-phishing toolbars for Windows a few months ago. The more sophisticated […]

Lets hope its more Jack Webb than Leslie Neilson. I used to think that the whole category of anti-spyware software was redundant because the established anti-virus products should be perfectly capable of detecting all the threats detected by anti-spyware. They just werent looking for them. Theres still a lot of truth to this. The scanning […]

A couple weeks ago we had a slightly odd report of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer. It was perfectly plausible, and Microsoft as much as confirmed it by not denying it. The original research report claimed that fully patched Windows XP SP2 systems could be exploited through Internet Explorer 6. It was noteworthy that the […]

When strange, inexplicable things happen on your Windows computer, what do you assume is the cause? Probably, youll think you have a virus, or some spyware, or one of those other bad things you read about even in the local newspaper. But you may be wrong. Very few things about Windows are inexplicable to Mark […]

Reports on the Full-Disclosure research list and by the SANS Internet Storm Center indicate a common bug in software that interacts with the Windows registry. The bug could allow malicious programs to hide values there, obscuring evidence of their presence on the system. The problem involves registry values with names between 256 and 260 characters […]

Im one of those people that everyone comes to with their computer problems. The other day my electrician was telling me how he went away for a while and turned his computer off while he was gone. He had current anti-virus software and a firewall, but when he came home and turned it back on, […]

It was 10 years ago this Wednesday, Aug. 24, 1995. Into a world dominated by American military power and 16-bit operating systems Microsoft launched Windows 95. It really did change the world, and in the process it doomed us to an insecurity in computing that its hard to see us escaping. Microsoft had only token […]

Looks like I hit a sore spot a few weeks ago with my column about how home users are unprepared for disaster. I focused on a favorite subject of mine, the use of cheap external hard drives as a backup medium. I ignored or gave short shrift to some other means of backup and heard […]

At first glance, Microsofts August vulnerability and patch set seemed like a real killer set of vulnerabilities. One of them in particular, MS05-039 (Vulnerability in Plug and Play Could Allow Remote Code Execution and Elevation of Privilege), caught attention as a “wormable” hole. Network-wormable vulnerabilities are the worst kind. They allow an attack to take […]

Thanks, Wolf. Theres nothing to raise awareness of a computer threat quite like a news flash on CNN. Heres the follow-up story: CNN Network Admins Betray Incompetence At Security. Deadlines! If only my column were due on Wednesday rather than Tuesday I might have written a different one than the yesterdays, where I dismiss Microsofts […]