Security

For years, Apple fans have claimed that Macs are invulnerable to attack, while belittling Windows as being full of security holes. Now the tables are turned --- not only has a Trojan infected Macs and created a botnet, but several well-known researchers warn that Mac OS X is less secure than either Windows or Linux.

In Friday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches a Mac OS X Trojan construct a botnet for distributed denial of service attacks and sending spam. Not to mention Drop7...

There are four approaches to dealing with malware-infested Windows machines, and too many articles on the subject only consider the worst one. Here is a run-down on the pros/cons of each approach.

There's a new division inside Microsoft dedicated to the security and identity problems IT face.

More than ever before, we live in an information-generated society. Gone are the days when most folks had to hear “news” not only hours, but even days after events unfolded. Today, we’re privy to up-to-the minute updates that often use live feeds. That said, not everyone in government participates in that type of data exchange. I’m not sure if it’s a generation gap or just a desire to retain the status quo.

There are all kinds of differences between the two, but a major one, which often gets over-looked, is that Linux is in a constant state of evolution, while Windows moves 'forward' in a series of year-long steps. Here's what that means for you.

Firefox fans take note: A just-released report from the security company Secunia found that Firefox is far more vulnerable than Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer --- and by a wide margin. In 2008, it had nearly four times as many vulnerabilities as each of those browsers.

In a special IT Blogwatch Extra, Richi Jennings watches bloggers debate the carbon footprint of spam and spam filtering. Not to mention another Photoshop disaster...

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A letter from the chief security officer at the entity responsible for developing and enforcing reliability standards in the U.S. power sector suggests that many owners and operators of power generation and transmission systems may not even realize they own critical cyber assets.

When we last left our intrepid blogger (way back on Friday), he'd pointed the finger at Vista's Disk Defragmenter and cried, "J'accuse!"

For the last couple months I've been troubleshooting a vexing problem on my new quad-core HP desktop: Roughly once per week, the machine would start running as slow as molasses.

Microsoft has thrown down the gauntlet to Linux and Mac OS X users: It now claims that Vista is more secure than any operating system ever created, including Linux and Mac OS X. I've got details in my blog.

Look, I'm all for saving money. My income tax return isn't so complicated that I require a tax specialist or an accountant to prepare it. So, like lots of people, I use tax software to complete mine. I've been preparing similar types of returns for retirement plans (called 5500-series forms) in my day job for over 25 years so I'm used to working with financial numbers.

The vulnerability of the US power grid should be a wake-up call to any person or company that has critical or sensitive information on computers: keep those computers off the Internet.

I love Twitter as much as the next person.  However, a worm infected Twitter Saturday highlighting security concerns of using the popular micro-blogging site.  The Twitter worm sent automatically generated tweets urging users to visit the site StalkDaily.com (do not visit the site).  Messages looked like this: