Adobe's Version 8 and 9 PDF readers - Acrobat and Reader - will be patched March 11 according to my information sources. In th mean time you should watch out!

And hey - when was the last time you got a parking ticket that installed malware on your computer? Just wait!

The browser/phishing wars keep getting harder to beat. Now we have bogus "session expired" screens popping up when you're legitimately logged into your bank's web site. We also have nasty trojans that stop your system from getting help by blocking access to Microsoft Update and your favourite anti-virus sites.

Microsoft yesterday took the non-typical step of issuing an update for most of their operating systems "out of band" - meaning not at the usual time of month. This particular exploit they are patching affects anything except Windows 95/8 it seems

Over the weekend I received a phone call from someone purporting to be from a major credit card company offering me a great deal on balance transfers, etc.

Sometimes I brush these calls off but sometimes I let them ramble - both to learn about how they do what they do, and to in some cases teach them about how at least I (and hopefully you too) view their methods and expectations of what we will and won't give them in the way of information.

In this case I was mildly surprised - but not much - at what this person knew about me - name, company name, address, phone number (they used the business line, not the home one) etc.

Firefox, IE and Safari web browsers are all being attacked (yes, including Firefox on MAC and Linux) by a malicious/nasty Flash banner ad campaign including banners on some very popular sites.

The attack takes the form of copying a URL that points to a nasty site onto the browser's Clipboard - where cut/paste operations are stored.

Welcome to our new mail-list software. Like "Mailman" this too is open source software - called phpList from tincan limited in the UK. I've been using Mailman for quite a number of years and will continue to use it for what it was meant for - mail lists where members correspond with one another.
On the other hand, many of my customers need mail list software for sending out messages - marketing information, answers to questions, bulletins, support information, etc. where all the traffic is outgoing, and where the fact that someone has read a particular message and acted upon it (feedback) needs to be tracked somehow.

A recent study found that at least 45.2% of web users were not using the most secure version of their chosen browser, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or whatever. But it gets better... most of them (577 million out of 637 million in the survey) are using an old version of Internet Explorer. The rest include 38 million users of Firefox, 17 million users of Safari and about 5 million users of Opera.

You're not one of those with an old version - are you???

I read a bulletin from the Internet Storm Center http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=4465 a couple of days ago about the fact that there are active exploits (nasty advertising links and videos) already on the net for a vulnerability that has just surfaced with all current and previous versions of Adobe's flash player.

It turns out this is an old attack and that the affected player versions are still being used by many people. You should check your IE and Firefox (and other) browsers separately for the version of the Adobe flash player they use. This can be done by browsing to this address: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507

In my case my Firefox on Linux is 9.0.124.0 - which is the correct/latest one - my Windoze box is down for the count after a power burp a couple of days ago - but I'll check it as soon as I have it back up. It's a good thing I don't rely on Windows eh???