Adobe Acrobat has a history of tripping over security and they do so, in part, because Adobe seems to be determined to prove that they cannot be forced to learn from history, Adobe has spent years trying to repeat the mistakes of Microsoft Office’s early macro fiasco by including JavaScript in Adobe Reader and then

Update: a quick tip of the hat to Steven, who sent us a URL for a somewhat related blog about problematic premium text services. Speaking of the 2008 report, here’s another extract, this time about fake antimalware. "We expect to see increasing volume and sophistication in criminal attempts to extort money from end users in

Security issues with PDFs are nothing new, as a skim through past Adobe security bulletins and advisories indicates. (This isn’t a criticisim of Adobe: it’s inevitable that security issues will surface from time to time in sophisticated, function-rich software, and Adobe are clearly aware of the need to address the problems as they arise.) In

I recently started writing weekly tech tips for the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. If you are interested in these tips you can find them at http://www.sdchamber-members.org/TechTip.htm. Past tips are archived there as well. Randy Abrams Director of Technical Education

ICANN’s Fast Flux Working Group recently announced an Initial Report. In fact, it also offered a 20 day window for submitting comments on the report, but I missed that, as I was travelling and didn’t read that particular email. Perhaps you did better, in which case you probably won’t be much interested in this blog.

A few days ago, I promised (threatened) to make some general points about biasing test results, but travel and other obligations have been getting in the way. I’ll get back to that very shortly, but in the meantime, I want to look at an issue with the latest round of Microsoft patches that I was

I don’t regard myself as being particularly naive: I know as well as you do that having an excellent product is not enough on its own. You usually have to market it properly as well: otherwise, it sinks because no-one is buying it, so no-one is making a living. I know, too, that this industry is not

It is the longest standing un-patched Microsoft vulnerability I know of, and Microsoft calls it a “feature”. Microsoft calls it “autorun”, I call it “auto-infect”.  The idea of autorun is to attempt to make it so that a person can use a computer with a minimum amount of knowledge. This emphasis away from education is

As the Win32/Waledac nuisance continues to escalate, it’s good to know that there are some certainties in a changing world. One, unfortunately, is that people will continue to fall for hoaxes and chain letters. Much to my surprise, one of my mailboxes has just been visited by an old friend, a hoax that has been

Pierre Marc just posted about “Win32/Waledac for Valentine’s Day”. The fake greeting cards are an ongoing scam. As Pierre Marc indicated, this one is using polymorphism, which is a fancy way to say the malicious software disguises itself to look different each time someone encounters it. This is done to break signature based detection, which