“Sure, I could get a Mac, but the time I spend with my daughter removing spyware is very precious.” A great line, already being attributed to Intel CEO Paul Otellini, but actually penned by Good Morning Silicon Valley’s John Paczkowski on the GMSV blog. However Paczkowski was reporting on words…

Do you know what a “demand draft” is? If you’ve ever received an electronically-generated check which had “Your depositor has authorized this payment to payee” on it, or “signature not required” in place of the signature, then you’ve received a demand draft, or “remotely created check”. If you’ve ever used…

In what may be the biggest leak of personal data to date, police are reporting that a whopping 676,000 bank customers have had their personal information stolen from Bank of America, Wachovia, Commerce Bancorp, and PNC Financial Services. B of A has already notified over 60,000 customers that their confidential…

In one of the first tests of its new security advisory system, Microsoft has announced a vulnerability in the Windows TCP/IP stack. The security advisories are a supplement to the Microsoft Windows Security Bulletins which are issued on the first Tuesday of each month. According to today’s advisory, Microsoft is…

How many people a day do you suppose go into a mega-electronics store like Circuit City and purchase a new computer? And how many of those people do you suppose have the store like Circuit City transfer their personal data from their old computer to their new computer for them?…

It’s bad enough that military and government computer systems at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were hacked and compromised. But to add insult to that injury, it appears that they were all hacked by the…

Microsoft this week has announced a newly-discovered vulnerability in its Windows Explorer for Windows 2000. When the vulnerability is triggered, someone wishing to exploit the vulnerability would be able to remotely execute code on the user’s system, the advisory explained. “A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the way that…

That gaping hole in Tiger’s Dashboard is no air vent – it’s a wide-open, highly exploitable security threat for users of Apple’s newest version of OS X for Mac. And we have Stephan.com’s Zaptastic and Goatse widgets to thank for showing us the big hole. For those of you who…

Firefox, which is by all accounts and measures a superb web-browser, recently celebrated their 25millionth download. Yes, you read that right – Firefox has been downloaded twenty-five million times, and in large part this is due not only to its excellent user interface, but its generally providing a much more…

Even before security became one of the top issues on the Internet, remembering passwords was a hassle, admit it. Far too many of us recycle the same password or few passwords, over and over, knowing that we shouldn’t, and hoping that nobody catches on to us, tricks us into revealing…

Aunty told you about wifi hotspot evil twins, but you didn’t quite believe her, did you? Well, attendees of the Wireless LAN Event in England this past week are believers now, after hackers infiltrated the conference, and set up an evil twin hotspot right there at the conference, in a…

Security firm Secunia has issued a “highly critical” advisory for a security flaw in Netscape. The highly critical flaw was discovered earlier this week, and is known to affect at least Netscape versions 6.2.3 and 7.2. It may also affect other 6.x and 7.x versions of Netscape. According to Secunia,…

There has been a lot about “pharming”, which is another term for DNS poisoning, also known as DNS cache poisoning, in the news lately. But what exactly is DNS poisoning? Put simply, DNS cache poisoning is when a DNS server is made to tell your computer that a domain resides…

Does your favourite wifi hotspot have an evil twin? How would you know an evil twin wi-fi hotspot if you saw one? Just what is a wifi hotspot evil twin, anyways? Remember the Patty Duke show? When Patty and her identical cousin Cathy would pull the old switcheroo, and Cathy,…

Microsoft today issued nine new security bulletins containing updates and patches. The Microsoft security bulletins include updates and advisories for everything ranging from Microsoft Word to MSN Messenger, from Exchange Server to Internet Explorer, and from TCP/IP to the Windows Shell. Windows users using Microsoft Word 2000, 2002, or 2003,…