Internet Virus Storm Center

A student keyed me in on this great site offering real-time information on virus traffic on the Internet. http://isc.sans.org/ SANS, ironically, is a technical book publisher, and offers this site as a way to build traffic to their commerce portal – very interesting. Anyway, nice place to bookmark. Rwww.micklerandassociates.com(C) 2005. All rights reserved.

Comcast 4.13 Outage

Comcast suffered a significant outage affecting a majority of the North American broadband customers on Wednesday April 13. My own broadband was included and I was unable to normally access the Internet. This issue was related to how the Internet researches a looks-up names – the Domain Name System (DNS) allows friendly names of URL’s [...]

Holy HIPAA Batman!

MSNBC recently reported on a San Jose firm that likely exposed 185,000 patient records. Apparently from the phsycial theft of microcomputers, the security compromise should be an interesting case to watch in the context of HIPAA: to what extent will the practice be held accountable for the theft under the Privacy and Security Ruling. If [...]

Spyware as a Business Model

From the US-CERT Update this week:Hackers Write Spyware For Cash, Not Fame: More than 70 percent of virus writers are now writing spyware under contract, one more piece of evidence that hacking has evolved from mischievous hobby to money-making criminal venture, a security firm reported Monday, April 4. Aladdin Knowledge Systems said its analysis showed [...]

The Debate on Patriot Act Renewal

I found the ACLU offers an extremely valuable understanding of how Patriot compromises American civil liberties. This is an interactive guide that walks through Constitutional protections that are violated or ignored by Patriot. The Patriot Act represents a dangerous incursion of the federal government’s authority. It authorizes law enforcement to bypasses traditional wiretap, electronic eavesdropping, [...]

Symantec Products Security Announcement

US-Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) released a bulletin last week on a number of Symantec’s security products that are exposed to hacker attacks. These products (Norton Anti-Virus, Internet Security, and System Works) need to be updated with a LiveUpdate event to permanently patch the problem. They also released the 10-highest virus and trojan threats for [...]