Larry Seltzer

Spyware doesnt get discussed enough for a number of unfortunate reasons. For most people, the distinction between spyware and some other malware installed on their system is too subtle to bother with. Even experts are vague with their use of the term spyware at times, conflating it with “adware” and other vague categories of nasty […]

Many thanks to my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, editor of our Linux & Open Source Center, for referring a recent Forrester Research report to my attention. As Stevens own story on the report shows, the main finding, counterintuitive to many, is that there is no obvious answer to the question of whether Windows or Linux […]

Yet another variant of the Bagle worm has hit the Internet. Anti-virus companies say it is spreading quickly and have given it an elevated alert status. Bagle.U (Beagle.U in Symantecs dictionary) is a very simple worm. The e-mail message in which it arrives has no subject line or body. The attachment has a randomized file […]

Around the peak of the dot-com era there was a series of incidents that introduced most users to the term DDoS, or distributed-denial-of-service attack. These came to be known as the “Mafiaboy” attacks. The attacks were somewhat scary in that they brought down, one by one, the biggest and most prominent Web sites on the […]

News reports indicate that European Union antitrust regulators are likely to order Microsoft to offer a version of Windows without Windows Media Player. Because nobody would want that version at the same price as the full version, the EU will order that version to be sold at a discount to the full version. But at […]

McAfees Avert labs is reporting that a new variant of the Netsky worm, Netsky.P, is spreading quickly. Both McAfee and Trend Micro Inc. rate Netsky.P as a “medium” threat and Symantec Corp. has rated it a “2” (for “Low,” on a scale of 1 to 5). This is the first new variant of Netsky seen […]

Many people have made the suggestion, without a whole lot of thought behind it, that we could solve the spam problem with a “sender pays” scheme. Just as with snail mail, the sender of an e-mail should pay a “postage” fee. It neednt be large; even a fraction of a penny would change the economics […]

Security researchers on Friday uncovered a vulnerability in the open-source Apache Web server software that could easily enable a denial of services attack. The discovery follows on the heels of three holes found in the popular OpenSSL security software Wednesday. The Apache problem is one of several reported in Version 2.0.48, and lets an attacker […]

A series of new variants of the prolific Bagle worm has raised alarms in the security community through an innovative infection mechanism: The e-mail message in which the variants arrive may have no file attachment, and its possible for a user to become infected without having to launch one. The message includes a Windows ActiveX […]

Security discussion lists and reports were abuzz Wednesday with talk of a new worm, named “Phatbot,” that had spread to as many as hundreds of thousands of systems. But not all security experts agreed that the worm was widespread. As of late Wednesday afternoon, no major antivirus company had listed the worm as more than […]