Privacy, Security Archive

To respond to the somewhat alarmingly real threat of spyware, malware, and to a lesser extent viruses on the Windows platform, Microsoft used its recently-acquired security technology combined with its own in-house work to build Windows OneCare Live (codenamed Atlanta). Read here for a preview. Please note that the 'next' button is placed underneath the Google ads, almost invisible.

"There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's a topic of public concern and a "safe issue" for politicians, we can expect a flood of computer security-related legislation from lawmakers. So: computer security is definitely still a "hot topic." But why are we spending all this time and money and still having problems?"

Confusion, fear, procrastination; these are words often associated with making decisions about IT security and as threats become more sophisticated it is easy to see why. The increasing popularity for workforce mobility have made detecting and eliminating threats purely from within the corporate network alone an inadequate approach to network security.

This article is geared towards techies at libraries and schools and will attempt to address common security problems that may pop up at these institutions. The author gears the solutions towards Open Source, freeware, and base operating system security in a Windows XP/2k environment.

A USA Today article briefly covers the debut of several new consumer-oriented technologies that contain copy-protection technology, including tech for digital textbooks that can't be copied and "expire" after a year. It also touches on copy-protection tech that failed in the marketplace.

The encryption scheme you rely on today might be full of holes just a few years down the road. Learn how far we've come in the last few decades, and why your apps need to be ready for change. This article builds on a previous article about Enigma, Germany's WWII-era encryption system.

Researchers from a little-known security software company named Sunbelt Software have seemingly uncovered a criminal identity theft ring of massive proportions. According to one of their employees, Alex Eckelberry, during the course of one of their recent investigations into a particular Spyware application - rumored to be called CoolWebSearch - they've discovered that the personal information of those "infected" was being captured and uploaded to a server.

This article covers the various forms of wireless data transmission, and addresses the main security problems in WiFi today.

It looks as if Cisco's cease and desist letters to Web sites hosting Michael Lynn's banned Blackhat presentation detailing a critical flaw in the company's IOS operating system are not having the effect the company desires. An increasing number of other Web sites are now making available Lynn's presentation to whomever cares to read or download it.

A security expert has agreed never to repeat what he knows about various flaws in Software from networking giant Cisco.

LANguard Network Security Scanner will scan computers for known vulnerabilities and common misconfigurations and other potential security issues. It produces reports that can be used to assist in the tracking and mitigation of security issues that have been identified.

SecurityFocus published an interview with BlackHat/Defcon speaker Dan Kaminsky. He was guest-hacker at the Microsoft BlueHat event, and met Redmond's engineers and management. His conclusion: "My sense is that a combination of respect for SP2 and growing fear of Google (which has an entirely different, and arguably more managable security posture than Microsoft can achieve) has really pushed people towards seeing security in 2005 as stability was in 2000/2001."

Microsoft has acknowledged that it is working on a patch for a potentially serious security hole in fully patched versions of Windows XP Service Pack 2.

A denial of service vulnerability reportedly affects the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol. Either disable RDP or make sure you have a firewall enabled for port 3389 until a fix is available.