Larry Seltzer

I recently went to buy new cell phones for my wife and me. Verizon Wireless had been nagging me to do this over the phone or online for a while and Ive been due for a “free” upgrade for almost a year, but I want to see and try the phone in my own hands […]

Many years ago I complained about Microsofts update policies, specifically about the sheer number of updates that were available only online. What was needed was a disk version of Windows Update. If you bought a new computer and connected to the Internet, especially for a dial-up user, you faced hours of updating from Windows Update, […]

Web browsers are such an important and, by now, mature application, youd think theyd have error messages down. But in fact theyre pretty bad at them. Even routine errors like mistyped addresses present messages that are confusing to novices. The Web is simple when everything works right. Of course, it doesnt always work out that […]

I was very impressed with a recent story in the venerable Virus Bulletin by a couple of McAfee research engineers. The authors, Vinoo Thomas and Nitin Jyoti, argue for in-house honeypots and other techniques to trap in-house bots. Dont get carried away; honeypots are an old idea. But its still a good one to run […]

Data like that in the Phishtank Annual Report is always good fun for those interested in security threats. You can learn a lot from such raw data. PhishTank is a project of OpenDNS, a free DNS service worth considering for other reasons. PhishTank is a database of phishing URLs submitted by the public and voted […]

Just over a year ago I wrote a column about Trend Micros ICSS (InterCloud Security Service). Its a service to assist ISPs in detecting bots on its customer networks and removing them. An extremely cool idea I thought; perhaps the time was upon us when ISPs would actually take measures to clean up their networks? […]

The name “iBOT” is already taken. It may soon be taken in vain if the iPhone becomes a popular target for malware. For years Ive been continuously incredulous at the lack of interest by the black hat community in the Mac platform. There have been large numbers of serious vulnerabilities, many of which sat unpatched […]

For weeks now Ive been thinking on and off about “deperimeterization,” a term that has been used in a variety of ways for years. Some analyst talk got it in the news recently. At least the goal of deperimeterization is to enhance security. That I can respect. The abstract point seems to be to identify […]

Probably the best intellectual argument against the dominance of Windows in the market is the “monoculture” argument. This idea states when a high percentage of users are using the same platform, the population of users is too vulnerable to attacks on that platform. Windows is basically as dominant as ever, but a number of other […]

eWEEK is, of course, a good place to get security content. One reason is that we wade through the mucky raw materials of security news and give you the important stuff. If youve got the time, or if its your job, you can also follow those raw materials. Because its a relatively old field, in […]