Security

This post is long overdue. Having completed my How to Secure Your Computer series of articles, it’s time to get links to all of them organized on a single page.
The series debuted on January 4, 2007 here on Ask the Geek, Too. I continued to post them here until March, 2008 when other commitments [...]

Many of us have come to know and love the Cisco PIX 500 Series as a robust firewall for the SMB (Small and medium business) customer. Virtually 95% of the clients that my consulting firm services have either a PIX 501 or 506 firewall in place. But as of July 28, 2008, you will no [...]

I sometimes enjoy playing with codes and ciphers. In fact, a long time ago (eighth grade, 1966), I got my introduction to cryptography from a book aptly named Codes and Ciphers written by Alexander d’Agapeyeff. My friends and I had some good laughs getting caught passing encoded notes in class; the nun couldn’t decipher them. [...]

Recently, a person I know (who shall remain nameless to prevent embarrassment) had his laptop stolen out of his car. Now, to his credit he had been faithfully backing up his data. Smart guy. He would back up all of his data weekly to a CD and take it home for secure storage. Good plan. [...]

Steve Gibson, creator of Spinrite and winner of the Third Annual People’s Choice Podcast Awards in the Technology/Science category for his Security Now! podcast with Leo Laporte of Twit.tv, has just come up with a super-secure multifactor authentication system. Steve calls it “Perfect Paper Passwords” and you can read all about it on his web [...]

If you’ve been following this series of security maxims, you’re probably pretty careful about what you do on the web. You certainly have strong passwords for all of your logins, all of them different, and you don’t go around telling people what they are or keeping them on sticky notes attached to the monitor at [...]

The wizards at Redmond have done it again. Not only did they not tell us about the updates to Windows Update on our PCs, they managed to break the XP repair function. From Windows Secrets:
After a repair install of XP, which resets the operating system to its original state, Windows Update can’t install the 80 [...]

According to Secunia Advisory SA26960, If you have the Ask Toolbar installed on your system, you’re at risk. From Secunia Weekly Summary - Issue: 2007-39:
A vulnerability has been discovered in the Ask.com Ask Toolbar, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system. The vulnerability, a boundary error in the AskJeevesToolBar.SettingsPlugin.1 ActiveX control [...]

I first heard of this in the latest issue (Vol. 7, #39 - Sep 25, 2007 - Issue #296) of WXP News.
“A security flaw has been discovered in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, which is installed on a huge number of PCs. The vulnerability allows attackers to compromise Windows computers…. This problems affects Acrobat Reader versions 7, 8.0 [...]

Most people do, of course, and the best cartoons are the ones that make learning  tough lessons a little easier. PC security lessons are hard for the non-geek user to learn and most people learn them only after getting burned by malware, becoming a victim of identity theft, or suffering financial loss from online fraud. We IT security [...]

The good folks over at Secunia have a nice, free, web-based tool to scan your computer for certain common vulnerabilities. I’m surprised I didn’t pick up on this before, as I get the Secunia alert newsletter.:
Secunia Software Inspector6 December, 2006 - Secunia is proud to announce the availability of the Secunia Software Inspector. Detect and update [...]

Steve Gibson, author of the best disk recovery and maintenance utility on the planet, Spinrite, developer of the first anti-spyware program, OptOut, and recipient of the People’s Choice Podcast Awards in the Science/Technology category for his Security Now! podcast with Leo Laporte of Twit, wrote the first firewall “leak test.” It has been downloaded 6,715,096 [...]

A friend of mine came up to me the other day and said, “I love your computer maxims, but I don’t have anything to worry about–I have all of my passwords stored on an encrypted thumb drive.” Of course, my retort was, “That’s a good thing. Where do you keep your backups?”
“On my external USB [...]

CardSpace (formerly InfoCard) is Microsoft’s new digital identity meta-system that comes with Windows Vista by default. Now, if you have .NET Framework 3.0 on your PC, you have CardSpace; it’s a .NET 3.0 component. But you probably didn’t know that (I didn’t) unless you’re a .NET enthusiast. There was no fanfare about it.
I’m glad to see it, in a [...]

Depending on which vendor you use, may not be as protected as you think. According to this article on the ClamAV website, only three vendors prevailed:
On August 8th at LinuxWorld, network gateway vendor Untangle performed an all-out public test of different anti-virus vendors to see how they really compare.
In an antivirus “fight club” conducted in front [...]

Got it today. Unfortunately, I have a blown keyboard that is preventing my Dell and, I presume, the Zonbu unit from booting. (I SO wanted to play with this thing tonight!) Tomorrow, I’m going to give it a run for its money and if it’s everything I think it might be, I’m going viral with [...]

Matt Hartley’s article in Lockergnome’s IT Professionals talks about the Zonbu “green” computer. Well, I’m not so concerned about the green aspect as I am about the security aspect. Zonbu looks like the perfect PC for the computer-illiterate, i.e., the average user. They say it’s immune to most of the bad stuff out there:
There are [...]

A computer term you should be familiar with is sandbox. Software developers often run their untested code in a protected environment called a sandbox. If the software misbehaves, the sandbox is shut down and everything returns to normal, no harm done. It’s a great way to prevent viruses and other malware from infecting your machine while browsing the web. [...]

In Maxim #7, I said that data security is senior to physical security. While true, physical security is only slightly less important. Taking steps to prevent theft of your computer is common sense. Sure, encrypt your data to make it useless to a thief if he manages to steal your hardware, but make it as difficult as possible [...]

We frequently hear news of a laptop holding sensitive information having been stolen. Bad in itself, but the reports often note that the information was unencrypted. Doubly bad. Certainly, physical security is important — you want to do everything you can to prevent physical access to, or theft of, your computer — but data security [...]