Larry Seltzer

I didnt need to learn about comment spam by reading eWEEK.com. Ive gotten waves of it in my own blogs comments. You may have noticed that you now have to fill in one of those challenge entries asking you to type in the text portrayed in a nearby graphic (a “captcha”), and this has largely […]

A lot of people lost e-mail, access to Web administration and even their porno accounts over the weekend. Yes, it was a momentous and stressful couple of days. Several domains were stolen, including panix.com, the home domain of Internet service provider Panix, the oldest ISP in the New York area (or so they say about […]

In my 2005 predictions column not too long ago I noted that researchers told me that the prospects for new vulnerabilities and attacks in 2005 were rich, in spite of a bumper crop of them in December. Sad to say, it looks like they were right. The first two weeks of 2005 have been insecure […]

Just a few months ago Bill Gates declared that Microsoft would do something about the spyware/adware problem. And the company wasted no time. In December it bought Giant Company Software. Giant wasnt an especially well-known company, but its product was well-regarded. Now, just one month later we have a free initial beta version of a […]

Back in DOS 5.0, Microsoft included an anti-virus scanner (a licensed version of Central Points PC Tools scanner). That was Microsofts last entry into the anti-malware market with a real product, back in an era when viruses generally needed floppy disks to spread. That scanner didnt even make it to DOS 6.0, and here we […]

Ive been a confirmed pessimist on the future of spam for some time now, so it was with a Spocklike upturned eyebrow that I read AOLs announcement last week that it has turned the corner against spam delivered to its users. Its quite a bold announcement. They claim that the amount of spam complaints from […]

Jan. 1 was the five-year anniversary of the Y2K “event.” It seems so long ago and so supplanted by more recent events as to be irrelevant. But its not. Y2K taught us lessons that will always be applicable: Dont believe everything the experts tell you, and be especially skeptical of worst-case predictions for technology. This […]

A new, free browser add-in from English Internet services firm Netcraft Ltd. fights phishing attacks and helps users investigate sites they visit. eWEEK.com tested the new tool bar, available initially only for Internet Explorer on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and liked what we saw. All but one phishing link we visited was interrupted by […]

I remember roughly when Windows 2000 “went gold”—when Microsoft finalized the shipping code for the product. It was mid-December 1999, and the product officially “shipped” in February 2000. I was writing part of a Windows 2000 book so I had early access. Five years ago is a long, long time in this day and age, […]

Malware authors on Christmas day left dubious “gift” packages in e-mailboxes across the Internet. Fresh attacks, which took advantage of old Internet Explorer bugs, as well as new versions of the Santy worm fouled the holidays for some Windows users and PHP server admins. A posting on the Full Disclosure mailing list described a new […]

Sometimes writing about security is just too easy. Making predictions about next year is like this in some ways. Lets pick some of the low-hanging fruit early. Even though most spam-tracking companies show that spam already comprises 75 percent or more of all e-mail, that proportion will go up in 2005. We are approaching the […]

Every now and then a real jewel comes out of the blogosphere. You hear about it when it happens, because everyone else links to it in their own blogs. I did this recently, linking to a blog entry by Peter Torr of Microsoft. Audacity sells, and Torr had the audacity to entitle his piece “How […]