Larry Seltzer

At a recent gathering of the New York Metropolitan Area chapter of the Internet Society at the Jefferson Market library in Greenwich Village, there was a panel discussion on Whois policy. The panel was top-notch, including people representing the varied interests in the matter. And while there is an interesting proposal on the table for […]

When it first came out in July, Symantecs report “The Mac OS X Threat Landscape: An Overview” revealed a collection of vulnerabilities and potential attacks that rivaled any major operating system (at least in their shipping versions). The updated version, released earlier this week, reinforces these conclusions, and in fact things are getting worse. And […]

Security is the lens through which I always view products like Windows Vista, and in that view it looks good. But there is a bigger picture with Vista for the industry: Its really, really different from previous versions. At many levels it requires a different approach. Security is just one prominent aspect of this, although […]

Just in time to address the anxiety that buyers might be feeling about recent embarrassing incidents of data loss due to stolen notebooks, the industry comes to the rescue to fill the niche. As much as you might argue that the notebook loss by the Department of Veterans Affairs and similar incidents were due to […]

Everybodys seen it by now. Spam is up like gangbusters in the last few months. And not just in volume; a lot more of it is getting through filtering mechanisms that had previously been pretty reliable. Its an aggravating and depressing situation. A number of factors have contributed to the situation, and what they all […]

Perhaps I was naive to think that security vendors would be appeased by Microsofts agreement to work with them around the limitations of PatchGuard. Some vendors remain defiant, some concerned. Some who were not concerned all along may simply not implement features that would be impeded by PatchGuard. After discussing the matter with Microsoft and […]

Are we on the verge of a revolution in authentication in this country? Many vendors and analysts feel that the impending implementation of the governments Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 mandate could lead to one. Heres the actual presidential directive. The government goals in this effort are to create a uniform and secure form of identification […]

To my mind its been obvious for many, many years, since before we even spoke of “botnets”: The only way to stop them is to get ISPs on board, to have them look for malicious behavior and stamp it out, even from paying customers. Recently a large ISP took such a step: BT (that used […]

You may not have noticed, but major changes are being implemented in the domain registrar business. As the operator of the .com and .net registries, VeriSign is the hub through which all domain registrars must operate. They do so through a set of software protocols. On Oct. 28, the old protocol, RRP (Registry Registrar Protocol) […]

Does it seem to you as if there are more and more vulnerabilities being disclosed lately? Youre right, there are. Jeff Jones, a strategy director in the Microsoft Security Technology Unit (“the team trying to make all Microsoft products more secure,” according to Jones), wrote a blog entry recently about data he tracks on vulnerability […]