Larry Seltzer

Its always gratifying, and a relief, to see government make a good decision. It just seems to stand out when they do. The news this time is about the Federal Trade Commissions report to Congress that a Do-Not-Spam registry is a bad and impractical idea. Not only did the FTC make the point that a […]

The major security changes in Windows XP Service Pack 2 mean big trouble for developers and users, a fact highlighted by Microsofts introduction this week of the packs second release candidate—the last major test before it hits the streets. Microsoft has a history of major releases with understated names, and Windows XP Service Pack 2 […]

Its hard to blame Comcast for beginning, as the Washington Post reported, to block port 25 on systems on their network that appear to be spammers. Everyone knows that a huge amount of spam is sent through broadband client systems that have been taken over—through backdoors—by spammers—zombied—and nobody has more broadband clients than Comcast. While […]

A bug in fully patched versions of Microsofts Internet Explorer Web browser allows violations of the browsers security zones, with the result that an unknown malicious site could assume the privileges of more trusted zones. Researchers on several security mailing lists have been discussing the bug since yesterday and appear still to be learning about […]

By now, youve probably seen the stories about the outrageous cost of spam to businesses. Most of it came from research firm Nucleus Research. eWEEKs story also cited research from MessageLabs, a respected mail security service. The report from Nucleus, here in PDF form, made some electrifying claims, the big one being that spam is […]

Even in a small business, users need to have access to the company network when theyre away from the office. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are the most mature and trusted method for providing this access, and a spate of new appliances aims to bring this big-business luxury to smaller firms. In our testing of three […]

“Why me?” Thats what plenty of PC users were asking themselves last December, shortly after they opened an e-mail message from an acquaintance with this subject line and found their systems infected with Win32/Sober.C, yet another in a seemingly endless stream of worms zooming around the Internet. Many of those infected were probably good Internet […]

June is emerging as an easy month for Windows IT security personnel. On Tuesday, Microsoft revealed only two vulnerabilities in its products, both rated “moderate.” The first attack exploits a flaw in Microsofts DirectPlay service, used to implement multiplayer games on Windows independent of network details, and could lead to the failure of the application. […]

I remember resisting the urge to admire the author of Melissa, the first of the mass-mailer worms. It wasnt even all that mass a mailer, since it only mailed itself to the first 50 entries in the users address book. But there was something clever about the way the worm self-propagated through what we had […]

Spyware is definitely evil stuff. Most of the people who write it should be in jail. And lucky for us, there are lots of great products, some of them free, for finding spyware that may have made its way onto your system. “Adware” is another matter. Im not sure about “evil,” but I dont like […]

I like perimeter security. It just makes sense to have your best defenses at a point where they can have a whack at everything going in or out of the network. Obviously any large business knows this, but small businesses, which are manically cost-sensitive, often get by with no such barrier, or a false one […]

Symantec Security Response has revealed that it has analyzed the first 64-bit Windows attack code. The attack is a proof of concept with no payload. Named W64.Rugrat.3344 by Symantec, its very old-fashioned in technique. When executed it infects all 64-bit executable files, excluding .DLL files, in the directory from which it was executed, and all […]