General

Usually my Sunday submission is a bit more genuinely humorous, but not so much today.  Other titles I considered were “Your Tax Dollars At Work” and “Government Seeks to Tax Cyber-Crime Victims,” but the real title should be:

Congress to Enact Legislation To Make Bad Cyber Security Illegal

This is sort of the same as making being the victim of a mugging illegal.  But ...

Recent security updates to OSX and Safari closed some significant security holes in OSX 10.7, 10.8, 10.9 and Safari 6 and Safari 7.  But it appears that support for OSX 10.6 “Snow Leopard” has been discontinued by the Cupertino firm.  This update cycle included 27 patches that resolved issues that allowed drive by downloads, remote code execution (RCE), and “sandbox escape” exploits.  Also included were a couple of recent ...

Open SSL is an open-source Secure Sockets Layer library that is used by many secure web site.  OpenSSL puts the “S” into HTTPS, and provides secure, encrypted communications for password protected websites, such as ecommerce, social media, and email services.  The proof of concept exploit ...

As reported on Silicon Beat, security firm Symantec has released its report on the state of cyber-security in 2013.  The news is not good, with major increases in the number, scope, loss, and cost of cyber crime last year.  The good ...

Spec’s, a Texas based liquor store chain, the second largest wine merchant, with 165 stores in several states.  Evidently, 34 of those location were breached in a 17 month long network and system penetration exploit.  It appears that about 550,000 credit card records were stolen during that time.  The breach ...

On April 4 1994 the Mosaic Corporation, the company that became Netscape Communications, was founded by Marc Andreessen, a University of Illinois trained software programmer.  Netscape became the way that the average computer user was introduced to the Internet, and was responsible for turning web sites and web browsing into the phenomenon that it has become over the last 20 years.

There is a phenomenal article on the Continue Reading →