It was a tough choice to choose a title for this post. I also considered “It ain’t necessarily so” for a title. This blog is aimed at our less technical users, but perhaps more technical users will find it useful as a teaching aid as well. Today I am going to teach you how to
And a giant step for users! While working on a blog soon to follow this I discovered a behavior in Windows 7 that Microsoft has changed to make a small, but meaningful improvement in security. For decades the bane of IT professionals has been users who double click on anything they can. This has lead
In the first two parts (Part 1, Part 2) of this series I discussed some of the privacy issues associated with Flash and also explained the configuration options that Adobe offers. If you are willing to go through the hassle of creating an mms.cfg file and maintaining it then you really do have the ability
Now that cyberwarfare is out of the bottle, will anyone agree to not use it? In the summer of 1945 in New Mexico, the Trinity test gave rise to the term ground zero. Could Stuxnet may be measured as a definitive ground zero in cyberwarfare comparable to Trinity? Concerning Stuxnet’s latest rise in China, David
Since its release in 2007, ESET Smart Security has received many accolades for its antimalware, antispam and firewall functions. However, we have recently been the recipient of a very dubious honor; a rogue antivirus program which masquerades as our own software. The Rogues Gallery Rogue antivirus is a loose family of programs that claim to
In the first part of this blog I told you how to use the basic Flash configuration utility. This blog is for the techies. This time I’ll share with you how to shut the doors on Flash and only open them to the sites you want to trust. Very few people seem to know that
Adobe Flash is, in my opinion, the most ubiquitous spyware in the world and no products detect it as such. The reason it goes undetected is that it also has numerous legitimate uses, however, there is growing evidence that indicates significant abuse. This will be the first in a series of blogs in which I
In researching today’s SC Magazine Cybercrime Corner article “From sci-fi to Stuxnet: Exploding gas pipelines and the Farewell Dossier”, I came across this ‘Damn Interesting’ article which showcases the successful cyberwarfare compromise of a SCADA / pipeline control system nearly thirty years ago, an event which I had heard stories about in Navy circles but
The short answer is the media wants a cyberwar. Cyberwar is a dark, sexy, mysterious headline that sells and so each time something nefarious happens on the internet that potentially involves two or more countries, security experts are besieged with the question “Is this cyberwar”? Let’s look back to the 1989 book by Clifford Stoll
The difference is that there have been reported sightings of Bigfoot. The keynote address at the Virus Bulletin conference today was given by Nick Bilogorskiy, a member of the security team at Facebook. To start with, I have known Nick for several years and I can tell you that he is very intelligent and a
An Associated Press release http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100927/ap_on_hi_te/us_internet_wiretaps today indicates that the Obama administration is drafting legislation that would require companies to make it technically possible to intercept all electronic communications in the US. This would affect all of the US telephone companies, Skype, and also companies, such a RIM (Blackberry) that are based outside of the US.
While the defining research on the Stuxnet topic doesn’t go this far, Forbes writer Trevor Butterworth went out on a limb to name names along with detailing the warfare aspects: As I noted last week – and as the news media have only begun to grasp – Stuxnet represents a conceptual change in the history
Recently a lawsuit was filed against Walt Disney’s internet subsidiary and some of its partners as well. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/17/flash_cookie_lawsuit/ At issue is the use of a special kind of cookie that is used in conjunction with Adobe Flash. These “supercookies” are called Local Shared Objects or LSOs for short. LSOs are not deleted when you use
Fantasy sporting leagues have become very popular. A good friend of mine is into fantasy car racing teams. Other friends are into fantasy soccer (football elsewhere in the world). In the US a lot of people are into the fantasy NFL (National Football League –not soccer). Recently a researcher, Gary Rios, joined an ESPN sponsored
Really – should any Alpha version be fed through a chipper-shredder like Diaspora has? The basics are simple: The basic premise behind Diaspora is that it will allow users to have social networking functionality similar to that offered by Facebook, but with far greater control over personal data. Diaspora was born earlier this year largely
In some computer programming languages there is an event called “mouseover”. This command is used to determine what happens when a user put the mouse over a specific object. When you put the mouse over a hyperlink and see where that link will take you, that is a “mouseover” command at work. When you place
So much of the time we security bloggers write about what you are not supposed to do, or try to tell you what you should do. This time it is different. This post is not about security it is about what one amazing individual can do and what you can do too, if you wish
I decided to download the card game Solitaire (by ZenTech Labs) on my Android based phone. Being a free app it is paid for by advertising. When you play the game there is always a banner ad at the bottom of the screen. One of the ads caught my eye. It said “Leslie2088 is .7
I recently received a couple of questions about signatures from a reader. 1- You said that ESET receives around 200000 unique malware samples daily, so does ESET detect most of them or detect only the malwares that their signatures are listed here: http://www.eset.com/threat-center/threatsense-updates ? 2- Nowadays why signatures are written? Are they written to detect
In addition to recently getting a Droid 2, I purchased a Motorola H17txt Bluetooth headset. When used with a Blackberry or an Android based phone you can download and install an application called MotoSpeak that will read text messages and emails through the H17TXT. Before you go looking for such a headset be warned, there
