Delegates at Infosec gave a resounding dismissal to a motion supporting VoIP deployment. The debate, “this house believes that the business advantages of VoIP outweigh the security concerns” ended in a fairly unanimous thumbs down, which implied security professionals don’t think the technology is ready for big money corporate rollouts.
Anti-virus firms at Infosec say they expect Vista and IE7 to change nothing for the industry. Microsoft used its presence at the show to laud the security features they’ve been busy building in the the upcoming software.
In particular, Microsoft was eager to talk about how Vista will finally jettison the need to run Windows as an administrator most of the time.
The firewall in Windows Vista will, by default, have half its protection turned off because that is what enterprise customers have requested, according to the software giant.
When Windows Vista is released early next year its firewall will be set to only block incoming traffic even though it will be capable of blocking outgoing traffic. According to a statement from Microsoft, the firewall’s protection will be curbed in order to make life easier for the company’s enterprise customers.
APRIL 26, 2006 (TECHWORLD.COM) - Microsoft is investigating a new zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer that could put fully patched Windows systems at risk of takeover. Less serious bugs have also been reported in the Firefox and Safari browsers.
The IE bug, discovered by Michael Zalewski and posted on the full-disclosure mailing list on Sunday, could allow attackers to take over a system, Zalewski said.
Just 3 out of 100 Internet users are able to sniff out sites ready to drop spyware or adware onto their computers, security company McAfee said Wednesday.
In an online quiz run by McAfee’s recently-acquired SiteAdvisor, a service that alerts users of possible spyware- and adware-infecting sites via search results at Google, Yahoo, and MSN, 97 percent of more than 14,000 consumers were fooled by one or more malicious sites.
Microsoft on Tuesday launched a site to promote Internet Explorer add-ons in an attempt to compete with Mozilla Corp.’s long-running site that specializes in extensions for the open-source Firefox browser.
The Add-Ons for Internet Explorer page hosts both free and for-a-fee add-ons to IE 6 and IE 7 Beta 2, and is organized in security, time saving, browsing, and entertainment categories. A search tool can be used to sift through the add-ons.
Only 1 in 7 business users bother to create different passwords for each Web site that requires authentication, a security company said Wednesday, a major security failure in the enterprise.
A Web poll conducted by Abingdon, U.K.-based Sophos showed that just 14 percent of the 533 business users surveyed use a unique password for each site. Forty-one percent, meanwhile, use the same password all the time, while the remaining 45 percent use “a few” different passwords.
Spammers get more response from smutty emails than any other form of junk email.
While penis pill offers and pharmacy drugs continue to bring in a small percentage of punters, as many as one in 20 recipients visit porno websites after receiving lewd come-ons by email. Response rates for pharmacy drugs (0.02 per cent) and “Rolex watch offers (0.0075 per cent) are miniscule by comparison, according to a study by email filtering firm CipherTrust. The sales to click-through ratio for pharmacy drugs is one to 150.
The number of phishing attacks targeting non-English speaking financial institutions is on the rise.
Attacks targeting countries outside the English-speaking world now represents almost 40 per cent of worldwide phishing targets, according to data processed by RSA Security’s Anti-Fraud Command Centre. RSA said it has shut down more than 10,000 phishing attacks hosted in 70 different countries.
Infosec Security features introduced in Windows Vista will make setting up PCs to boot in either Linux or Windows far more difficult, according to security guru Bruce Schneier. Vista is due to feature hardware-based encryption, called BitLocker Drive Encryption, which acts as a repository to protect sensitive data in the event of a PC being either lost or stolen.
