Dec 27th, 2006 - Here in the UK it is pantomime season. A peculiar form of traditional slapstick stage play that is performed during the Christmas season. In essence favourite tales such as Peter Pan, Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk and Aladdin are retold with the lead boy played by a girl and an ugly woman played... (Read More)

32 Days Ago - Just when it looked like every avenue to prevent the extradition of self-confessed NASA Hacker Gary McKinnon had been exhausted, especially when just last week a couple of High Court judges denied him leave to appeal his case to the highest court in the UK, it looks like the hacking cause célèbre... (Read More)

Sep 16th, 2009 - One third of businesses totally fail to encrypt their sensitive data transfers. That's the conclusion of a new survey into file transfer security which noted the huge disparities in attitudes towards data security in general and data security during transfer. According to the 2009 File Transfer... (Read More)

Sep 8th, 2009 - It's good news for those in the security business, according to Gartner at least. It is predicting that security software and services spending will outpace other IT spending areas in 2010. The Gartner report suggests that security software budgets will grow by approximately 4% in 2010, while... (Read More)

Aug 26th, 2009 - I'm not a great fan of the phrase 'total coincidence' and nor am I a fan of The Rt Hon Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills and Lord President of the Council to be formal. While I'm on the small matter of things I don't like, I'm not... (Read More)

Aug 14th, 2009 - As someone who works within the IT Security space, I have to say that rogueware (also known as scareware) is starting to seriously hack me off. Not that I have ever been conned into purchasing it, I hasten to add, but rather because so many others have and so many people are making rather a lot of... (Read More)

Jul 31st, 2009 - Gary McKinnon is either a UFO-obsessed nerd who happens to suffer from a form of autism, or a fugitive from justice who was responsible for the biggest military hack of all time. The description varies depending upon whether you are a balanced individual with no axe to grind or the US authorities... (Read More)

Jan 28th, 2007 - It started with an email from a worried satnav user, Lloyd Reid of Trichromic LLP an IT consultant who knows his way around a computer and knows a virus when his AV software flags one up. The cause for his concern being a newly purchased TomTom GO 910 satnav unit that, once connected to his PC,... (Read More)

Jul 17th, 2009 - Anyone else getting pretty fed up with the number of headlines both online and in the print media which have been exclaiming 'Twitter hacked' this week? I have even just got a press release, from a storage systems company of all things, that has the strap line of "Twitter hack caused by lack of... (Read More)

Jul 23rd, 2009 - Adobe has issued a security advisory following the discovery of what it describes as a "critical vulnerability" which exists within the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) across all platforms, Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems, The same vulnerability can be... (Read More)

Jul 22nd, 2009 - Well thanks for that O2, my iPhone was as much use as a chocolate teapot from lunchtime yesterday thanks to the pay monthly data network suffering a monumental failure. There I was, sitting in a (without wifi) Costa Coffee about to start an informal meeting with a potential client. I needed to... (Read More)

Jul 20th, 2009 - Usually quarterly spam trend reports from security vendors are, how can I put this nicely, actually I can't so I will just have to say it as it is: bloody boring and mostly pointless. However, the latest such report to fins its way into my mailbox from Sophos caught my attention because right from... (Read More)

Jul 14th, 2009 - Another of those security trending reports has dropped onto my desk, this one coming from PandaLabs which is now apparently part of 'Panda Security, The Cloud Security Company.' Jeez, someone needs to give the marketing director a kick up the pants for that one. Anyway, back to the report: it seems... (Read More)

Jul 10th, 2009 - Last weekend Twitter was apologising for accidentally suspending a number of user accounts due to human error. Now it is suspending accounts again, but this time there is no error: Twitter is getting serious about malware. In a status posting on Thursday July 9th, Twitter admitted that it had... (Read More)

Jun 30th, 2009 - No sooner had the news of the untimely death of Michael Jackson hit the Internet than the vultures started circling. For once it was not the gossip columnists and tabloid journalists digging up the dirt, but rather spammers and hackers looking to exploit a golden opportunity to distribute their... (Read More)

Jun 25th, 2009 - Am I surprised that many 'IT Security Professionals' appear to have had a common-sense bypass when it comes to the security of their own mobile devices? Nah, not really. Look, we already know that 88 percent of web users are morons and 93 percent of IT Admins are idiots so why should IT security... (Read More)

15 Days Ago - "If we went into an “evil room” and had an “evil light” shined on us, and we then behaved in an “evil” way we would be destroyed… there is a fundamental trust between Google and its users.” ~Eric Schmidt, Google CEO Google released an exciting new product today called the Dashboard. I don't... (Read More)

17 Days Ago - 12439 Leslie Stahl had a piece Sunday night on 60 minutes on the supposed impact of piracy on the movie industry. (You can watch it here.) Her piece was so slanted toward the Motion Picture Association of America, it was almost laughable (if it weren't so maddening). At one point, Stahl... (Read More)

Oct 13th, 2009 - To put it mildly, it's been a bad week for cloud computing. First of all word got out that Microsoft, the keepers of the data for users of Sidekick phones completely hosed the data. I mean kaput, gone, vanished. See you later, bye. If you don't have a back up, you are pretty much screwed because... (Read More)

32 Days Ago - Symantec has published one of those rare things - a report that contains an actual surprise. It seems some 4 million people have fallen for Scareware in the last 12 months. I'm stunned. Not because people are installing fake antivirus systems. That's a shame but in some ways it's inevitable;... (Read More)

Oct 5th, 2009 - Smaller businesses and people who use Hotmail as n email system or backup email system need to change their passwords - Microsoft has confirmed it's investigating a security breach. It seems that in spite of the industrial strength security everybody of any size applies to these systems - and... (Read More)

Oct 2nd, 2009 - A judge has said a lawsuit can be delivered via Twitter. It's an interesting case, an odd idea and a pity there are going to be so many logistical obstacles. The scenario is simple. Someone is posing as a (real) right-wing blogger - they've effectively 'borrowed' his name for a Twitter account... (Read More)

Jul 31st, 2009 - There has been a lot of comment in the past on Gary McKinnon and his hacking into US military computers. Readers might understand that some of the comment in the UK has been about how he should have been tried over here, there's no need to extradite him and if America's military systems are such... (Read More)

Jul 6th, 2009 - Facebook's page on which the location of the head of MI6's flat was available has been taken down. You also can no longer find information about his family and their whereabouts, which you could on the site previously. There has been a debate about this, of course. For Americans who aren't sure,... (Read More)

Jul 1st, 2009 - Security stories abound on the Internet, and as we enter a new month an old one has resurfaced. There are legal questions over the Sarah Palin hacking event last year. Graham Cluley has blogged about it. For me he's buried the main point right at the end of the story. I don't want to seem... (Read More)

31 Days Ago - It's not just phishing scams that Facebook users have to worry about right now, According to Roger Thompson, the Chief Research Officer with security vendor AVG, hacked Facebook applications are increasingly reaching out to exploit sites based in Russia. As Thompson says, this is different to... (Read More)

Aug 30th, 2009 - Symantec has detected a new Trojan which targets Skype users in order to monitor and record conversations made using the Internet telephony service. Apparently the source code for this particular Trojan, called Pesky Spy, is already being touted around the usual places where the bad guys can pick... (Read More)

Jul 26th, 2009 - So Google reckons that it can provide the perfect operating system in Chrome, even to the point where according to Google's Engineering Director, Linus Upson, it will herald the end of malware. That's what he went on the record to say, promising that Google was "completely redesigning the... (Read More)

Jul 27th, 2009 - The High Court in the UK will this Friday decide if an appeal against the Home Office backed decision to extradite Gary McKinnon on hacking charges to the US is to be upheld or, as seems likely, not. McKinnon has been accused of what US prosecutors refer to the biggest military computer hack of all... (Read More)

Jul 22nd, 2009 - Can anyone top this: the Ministry of Defence here in the UK has admitted that last year it managed to lose a server. A whole one, and get this, it was meant to be located in a secure government building for good measure. Over the years I have become more than a little immune to data loss... (Read More)

32 Days Ago - The other day I was on Facebook and a chat window popped up from a college friend of mine. Bob: Hey there. How are u doing? Sharon: ok. you? Bob: Am not too good. Im in some kind of deep mess right now Sharon: uh oh. what happened? What "Bob" didn't know was that I was already suspicious... (Read More)

Sep 25th, 2009 - Idaho, where I live, likes to brag when it makes lists such as "best places to live," "best places to start a business," etc. Now we've made another list: we're the most spammed. According to MessageLabs, which was acquired by Symantec in November, the ten states with the highest percentage... (Read More)

Sep 22nd, 2009 - Remember Terry Childs? He was the network administrator for the city of San Francisco who -- claiming he was protecting the city government's computer system from incompetent coworkers -- changed the system's passwords and then for more than a week refused to give them to anyone, even after being... (Read More)

Sep 20th, 2009 - Two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have learned that it is possible to predict which men in social networks are gay, even if they aren't out, based on who their friends are. It's the theory behind traffic analysis, or the process of intercepting and examining messages to... (Read More)

Aug 29th, 2009 - What, you hadn't heard? "A Senate bill would offer President Obama emergency control of the Internet and may give him a "kill switch" to shut down online traffic by seizing private networks -- a move cybersecurity experts worry will choke off industry and civil liberties," FOX News said... (Read More)

Aug 10th, 2009 - Want to do a public records search on email messages from your state legislator? Chances are, you won't be able to, even with the recent move toward transparency in government. Even states that do have an email retention policy in state government -- and many of them don't -- often don't... (Read More)

Jul 28th, 2009 - A group of University of Washington students and professors has developed an application called Vanish that automatically makes data used with it disappear after eight to nine hours. The open-source software is downloadable now, as well as information about how to use it and a research paper... (Read More)

Jul 18th, 2009 - Some users discovered last week that Amazon has the capability to remove books from their Kindle electronic reading devices, even though they were bought, paid for, downloaded, and in the users' possession. Ironically, among the books with which this was discovered was George Orwell's 1984,... (Read More)

Jul 2nd, 2009 - Yahoo! announced this week that it would build what it said what would be the greenest, most energy-efficient data center in the world, powered by Niagara Falls. Data centers are some of the heaviest users of electrical power there are, both to run the servers themselves and to cool them. In... (Read More)

Nov 3rd, 2008 - There are 5 things that every good Linux Administrator knows. Do you know what they are? They are in no particular order of importance: 1. Users are a Necessary Evil - Do you ever wonder why System Administrators seem so annoyed by you and your questions? It's because you are, in fact, an... (Read More)