03/05/2009
Microsoft Not Patching Excel Security Flaw
In one of the more disappointing announcements of late coming from Microsoft, they announced today that even though they were rolling out three security updates, including a critical one, they weren't fixing one in Excel that, sadly, crackers are now exploiting. Symantec's researchers, according to a Computerworld article on the... Read more
03/02/2009
New Trojan Targets Unpatched Microsoft Excel Flaws
There's recent news afoot from a number of sources, including The Register about a Microsoft Excel Trojan. Several versions of Excel are vulnerable to this particular bit of malware including: Excel 2000 Excel 2002 Excel 2003 Excel 2007 Excel 2004/2008 for Mac Excel Viewer Excel Viewer 2003 How do you... Read more
02/20/2009
Conficker Worm Technical Analysis
Looking for the latest on Conficker/Downandup today, I came across one of the finest technical papers on a virus I've seen in a long time. The piece, published by SRI International, is an excellent example of the type of analysis that's needed to bring worms like Conficker to a halt.... Read more
02/16/2009
Microsoft Patch Tuesday: Another Angle
To the uninitiated, Microsoft has one day monthly, "Patch Tuesday," they call it, where they release bug fixes and patches to their software. A recent blog at IT World on Patch Tuesday talks about the once monthly cycle and asks if this is often enough. They claim, perhaps accurately, that... Read more
02/12/2009
Conficker Worm Reward Offered by Microsoft
Our blog has been quiet for a few days as we work on putting together some new guides to securing your computer and some other resources to help our visitors secure their PCs--and keep them that way. We hope to have that wrapped up in a couple of days here,... Read more
02/05/2009
Antivirus protection the old-fashioned way...
As most everyone would agree, in this day and age, anti-virus software of some kind is a necessity on your PC. In-the-know PC security experts would even go so far as to say a firewall is necessary, too. But what most never bother to talk about is other preventative measures--free... Read more
02/04/2009
Security patches in Firefox 3.0.6, upgrade urged
Well my dear computing friends, there's a new release of Firefox out: 3.0.6. This release of Firefox brings a number of security fixes of different levels of priority, four of which are 'moderate', 'high', or 'critical' in nature. For those of you that are new readers to our blog, we... Read more
01/22/2009
Virus Protection Warning about Autorun.exe (more on Downandup / Conficker)
Some readers may be unfamiliar with US-CERT. US-CERT is a big deal. It's the official United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team. As a division of the Department of Homeland Security, they're charged with helping keep U.S. citizens' computers safe. This week, in their revised advisory on Downandup / Conficker, they... Read more
01/21/2009
Downandup, Downadup, Kido!, Conficker: Update
For anyone unfamiliar with the worm known primarily as "Downandup / Conficker," here's a recap: it's a clever, nasty worm that's easy to get and hard to get rid of. How does Downandup / Conficker work? It works by modifying the way Windows "autorun" feature works, thus tricking users into... Read more
01/17/2009
Worm Attack: 9 Million PCs Hit
The smart folks doing research at Finnish security company F-Secure estimated another 6.5 million Windows PCs have been infected by Downadup / Conflicker worm... in the past four days. That adds to the 2 million plus that were already infected. If you haven't yet heard the story on this worm,... Read more