Larry Seltzer

SMTP authentication is coming. But in what form? There is a broad consensus among experts that SMTP authentication, by which Internet mail servers will be able to confirm that messages sent to them come from the domains from which they purport to come, will help to fight spam. Nobody thinks its the cure for spam, […]

A new worm has been detected by the virus research community that spreads through the LSASS vulnerability in various versions of Windows. Researchers and security companies are alarmed and have assigned an elevated threat level to the worm—named Sasser.A—even though it has not yet spread far. Unlike the Gaobot variant found several days ago that […]

Nobody really knows where worm authors go shopping for exploits to develop, but its widely assumed that they are greatly assisted by exploit code released by legitimate researchers. Go look at most vulnerability reports, and youll see references to where exploit code may be obtained. Why would a “legitimate” researcher do such a thing? If […]

Microsoft Corp. has confirmed in a knowledge base article that its patch for a critical bug can cause some Windows 2000 systems to lock up and fail at boot time. The patch is for a particularly critical vulnerability of which experts have begun to see exploits in the last few days. The knowledge base article […]

An exploit has begun circulating for another of the vulnerabilities in Windows revealed by Microsoft Corp. earlier this month. The vulnerability, a buffer overrun in the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS), was patched as part of a large, cumulative update coded MS04-011. The exploit takes the form of a new variant of the Gaobot […]

A disturbing pattern is emerging from the last couple of months worth of Microsoft security patches: Some of the critical vulnerabilities fixed had been reported to the company quite some time before, 200 days before the patch in one case. I spoke with Firas Raouf, chief operating officer of eEye Digital Security, a vulnerability management […]

One of the problems I hear about all the time, from analysts and vendors alike, is that of rogue mobile clients. Youve got perimeter defenses on your corporate network worthy of the Maginot Line, but mobile users can still travel, connect to the Internet on the road, pick up a germ on their notebook and […]

In the wake of Microsofts release last week of a series of “cumulative” patches to address a large number of serious security issues, the security community is debating the merits of Microsofts approach. One patch, for example, coded MS04-011 by Microsoft, was rated “critical” by the company. Like all of the patches released the same […]

If you look carefully at messages containing spam and e-mail worms, you see some things that arent right. In almost every case, the addressing information that accompanies any such e-mail message is fraudulent. (For more information see “Heading Off Spam”.) This is an important characteristic of these messages—and a big part of what allows them […]

An unconfirmed report from the Internet Storm Center at The SANS Institute indicates the possibility of exploits circulating that target the vulnerabilities patched just last week by Microsoft Corp. The report, titled “Possible combined exploits of MS vulnerabilities,” says that there is no general outbreak but that the group is hearing rumors of “super” exploits […]

In a recent column, I looked at the proposed SPYBLOCK (Software Principles Yielding Better Levels of Consumer Knowledge) act in Congress and concluded that the initial drafting of the bill does a poor job of defining the activities it bans. I dont want to defend a bad definition of spyware, but in all fairness, I […]

Ive been a fan of shared hosting as a cost-efficient solution for most Web sites, but you pay a price for saving that money. Im not as much of a fan as I used to be. In a way, its like taking a bath with strangers. You probably save a lot of water, but you […]