Security news you can use – The updates keep rolling!
December 30, 2009 by admin

Keeping your system secure is a never ending battle. The evil-doers on the net are getting ever more sophisticated, and coming up with new ways to fool, cajole, trick or force you into downloading, running or loading software on your system that will compromise your system – at best, rendering it unusable, or at worst, invading your privacy, or even draining your bank account. It’s a Wild West frontier out there in the interwebs!

With that, let’s take a look at some of the recent updates and developments ion security news:

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Weekly Security Roundup – Wheels in motion
November 18, 2009 by admin

This week, as I’ve compiled my list of updates to popular software packages – in the interest of keeping everyone informed and current to prevent security problems – we have quite a list of changes. Microsoft released their monthly “patch Tuesday” fixes last week, and on top of that we’ve seen browser security patches in Safari and Google Chrome; and we’ve seen WordPress get another security patch as well.

The moral of the story here is that you just can’t rest – as a computer owner with connections to the internet, you must keep active with your software updates – there are a seemingly endless stream of exploits being developed, and they almost always go after users with down-revision software. So, let’s see what’s been updated in the past week or so, and please do take a few minutes to check and ensure you are current with the latest versions.

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WordPress gets an interim update to 2.8.5, version 2.9 still in the oven
October 28, 2009 by admin

The WordPress development team has released an interim update to version 2.8.5.

Classified as a “hardening release,” this series of updates is focused on improving several areas of security concern, and is therefore recommended for anyone running WordPress on their site.

According to the WordPress Blog, the biggest changes in this release are:

  • A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
  • Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
  • Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
  • Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

If you are running WordPress and haven’t upgraded, please take the time and do so as soon as you can!

WordPress 2.9 is just around the corner, and beta testing is due to begin almost any day now. The final release of 2.9 is due out later this year, so keep an eye out here for news and availability.

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Software Security – Reprise
August 12, 2009 by admin

Well, here we go again! Another “Windows Patch Tuesday” has come and gone (Microsoft sends its Windows updates on the 2nd Tuesday of the month, if you haven’t noticed), and in this month’s batch we have a few interesting ones!

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