Gadgetopia

There's a new worm that's ramping up quick. It's an email that appears to be from Microsoft with a subject line something like "newest net critical pack" or "Network Patch" or another one of about six variants. It has an executable attached. I'm getting about one of these every five ...

We're just getting hammered by Sobig this morning. It got into a mailing list used by one of the organizations we belong to and we're getting them at the rate of one every five seconds or so. My Bayesian Outlook Filter is dumping most of them, but one guy here ...

The Day Email Died? "I wonder if this is the last straw that will convince people to move in droves to challenge/response or whitelist mechanisms, as I argued last year. And I'd be surprised if these volumes don't overload mail servers at major ISPs. We're seeing the closest thing yet ...

Microsoft: Bounty hunter: Considering they swallow $10 million in bad press for every Blaster or Sobig, this is quite a deal for them. "As the first part of the program, Microsoft (MSFT: Research, Estimates) announced two $250,000 rewards, a total of $500,000, for information that leads to the arrest of ...

SQL Server Gets Automatic Patch Updates: This is overdue. "Following the virus and worm devastation wrought by Blaster and SoBig this past week, Microsoft Corp. on Friday admitted that it has finally bitten the bullet and committed to automatic security patch updates for its SQL Server database"

I guess we have to give a perverted hats off to the writer of the Sobig virus. He (she? it?) has effectively killed a big portion of the Internet, in my market at least. The last time I couldn't get to USAToday.com was on September 11, 2001.

Lawsuit Takes on Microsoft Security Flaws: This kind of snuck in under the radar. There have been rumors for years about Microsoft being held accountable for the havoc its systems wreak when they get hit with another virus. "The company today confirmed that it had received a proposed class-action lawsuit ...

Zombie PCs spew out 80% of spam: Turns out spam is coming from places other than you might think. It's tempting to envision spam coming from some centralized location so we can all sit around and complain that they don't shut the loser off, but the reality appears to be ...

Cabinet says computers under attack: Is this the new frontier of international conflict? Don't bother invading physically, just bring down their IT infrastructure. "China has launched a systematic information warfare campaign against Taiwan, spreading Trojan-horse programs into private companies' computers as a means to break into government databases, the Cabinet ...