As I am certain everyone is well aware, there are a lot of things wrong with this world… I’m going to take a moment away from those things (which, much as I may care, I have little influence over) and the underlying goal of figuring out how to fix those things (with – ineffectual, I [...]

via Dark Reading Run Windows? No antivirus software? Direct connection to the internet? Let’s add a new time frame for computing disaster to the list above, one that every security pro should know: 20 minutes… that’s how long your average unprotected PC running Windows XP will last once it’s connected to the Internet … before [...]

Our poster boy is here with a serious lesson: this is why you should always de-fang / validate / sanitize / homogenize / scrub / lather-rinse-and-repeat all of your oh-so-precious input before interacting with it. Don’t let yourself become this guy… Image stolen from AdScam (who stole it from somewhere else, no doubt) … or [...]

They’re building laptops with hand-crank generators for kids in third world countries. You know what this means, right? The next generation of Nigerian spammers is going to look a lot like Popeye. – Unknown Not to worry, those laptops are running a relatively secure operating system and, while amusing, the Popeye Scenario isn’t a particularly [...]

The right thing is frequently a monolithic piece of software, but for no reason other than that the right thing is often designed monolithically. That is, this characteristic is a happenstance. The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to [...]

The site promises to deliver some utility you (or an unsuspecting member of your family) might find useful – perhaps it’s a collection of new smiley-faces to be included in chat, perhaps it’s an cartoon engine for creating cutesy avatars… whatever it is, it apparently includes a healthy dose of eyes-glazing-over legalese before it happily [...]