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When your family is at home and you’re not, I’m sure you have some worrying thoughts playing in your mind. Are they safe? Are the kids asleep? How is the Mrs doing? Although you may never know for sure, wouldn’t it be nice to have some visual reassurance that they’re OK? If you answered yes to that question, I’m sure you’d appreciate EZWatch Pro Video Surveillance products keeping a close eye on your loved ones.

Read the rest of What Price Security? It’s Not As Expensive As You Think »

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to use Windows. The reason is simple, by using Windows you as a consumer put yourself at the mercy of a corporation with a history of shady behaviour.

Nevertheless, I understand that adopting an alternative operating system is not an excercise that’s mentally or physically feasible for many people. The fact is most computer users are lazy. We tend to pick the path of least resistance; and this means sticking with the OS that we’re used to or that comes preinstalled with our computers.

However, there’s absolutely no excuse in making your computer insecure and potentially becoming a launchpad for attacks on other computers connected onto the Internet. Securing your Windows computer is not a difficult thing to do. In fact, it’s not only easy, but it can be done for free!

Essentially, there are five bases you need to cover to use Windows securely and I’m going to highlight them here.

Read the rest of 5 Things You Can Do To Make Windows More Secure »

Apparently, the US feels that cyber-warfare is very real. They’ve acknowledged that the Chinese PLA have successfully mounted a cyber attack on the US defence department’s computer network:

The PLA regularly probes US military networks – and the Pentagon is widely assumed to scan Chinese networks – but US officials said the penetration in June raised concerns to a new level because of fears that China had shown it could disrupt systems at critical times.

“The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system…and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale,” said a former official, who said the PLA had penetrated the networks of US defence companies and think-tanks.

If you happen to receive messages from any of your MSN Messenger contacts similar to these:

Accept dis picture homie

Accept dis picture homieDid you see this picture of Paris Hilton?

Is this you?

…and followed by a ZIP file sent to you; do not open whatever is in the ZIP file. This seems to be one of the newest MSN Messenger worm making the rounds.

I’ve yet to see any information regarding this potential malware. I’ll update if I find out more information. Searches on Symantec and Kaspersky returned nothing at the time of this post.

Update: So far, I had three attempts to send the file to me, and in all instances the file name is imgac157.zip. When I extracted the contents, there’s only one file called img1851.jpg-www.imagehosting.com.

Update 2: This morning (9:00am, 23 August 2007) AVG detected the virus as Backdoor.Ircbot.BAF. It must have been included in the latest definition update.

KUALA LUMPUR – August 17, 2007 – Data collected by SonicWALL, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNWL) from its Smart Network database of over 1.3 million e-mail users shows ongoing growth in the volume of spam, virus and phishing attacks, increased use of PDF spam and the emergence of a new wave of Excel and Zip spam. The results were based on aggregated results from the SonicWALL Smart Network from April to July, 2007.

Read the rest of PDF Spam On The Increase »