July 2008 Archives

SANS web application security course »

The SANS Institute is offering their Web Applications Security Essentials course (SEC422) via their @Home (webcast) program. There's a 40% discount for those who attended their now defunct Web Application Security Workshop in the last 18 months. VCU hosted that course last June and numerous VCU staff attended it. @Home...

Application feature - alerting user of concurrent sessions »

Earlier this month Google's Gmail added several new security features to the latest version of Gmail. A user can now see a list of current open sessions associated with the user's account. See an open session from an IP address you don't recognize or an access type you don't use...

Companies collect and share your data - check it for free »

Numerous private organizations collect data about you and share it with your creditors, employers and insurers. The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that the 3 national consume reporting companies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) each provide you a free copy of your credit report at your request once every 12 months....

"Spam King" sentenced, but another spammer escapes »

In a victory for email recipients everywhere, "Spam King" Robert Soloway was sentenced to 47 months in federal prison. Soloway had been accused of violating the federal CAN-SPAM Act. In loosely related news, convicted spammer Edward "Eddie" Davidson escaped from a minimum security federal prison camp in Colorado after serving...

SSN exposure at University of Maryland »

The University of Maryland mailed parking brochures to 24,000 students with their SSNs affixed to the brochures.

The cat's out of the bag - DNS flaw details revealed »

Dan Kaminsky's huge DNS flaw has been revealed.

Distance education required to play Big Brother? »

A change to the Higher Education Act will require distance education programs to verify that a student who participates in a class is the same person who registered for it.

San Francisco's rogue network admin »

A network engineer for the city of San Francisco was arrested and charged with computer tampering for failing to disclose the administrative password for the WAN.

Only 41% of web browsers are fully patched »

According to a study published on July 1st, on any given day only 41% of web browsers are fully patched. The data came from visits to Google websites worldwide between January 2007 and June 2008. Not surprisingly, Firefox came out on top because of its single click auto-update technology which...

Vulnerability in Word »

A vulnerability has been reported in Microsoft Word, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system. It's known to affect Word 2002 SP3 and is not believed to affect other versions. No patch has been released. Microsoft suggests viewing Word documents using their Viewer software instead....

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2008