A study by Verizon Business contends nearly 9 out of 10 data breaches could have been prevented with reasonable security measures in place.  The study also indicates the great majority (73%) result from external threats.  However, it is also pointed out that damages are usually greater from internal threats.  A summary of the study can be found at http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Your-Data-Breach-Was-Probably-Avoidable/

On April 8, 2008 Adobe released a Security Bulletin regarding vulnerabilities with various versions of Adobe Flash Player.  In the Security Bulletin they recommend upgrading to the latest version of Adobe Flash Player (at least to version 9.0.124.0 or higher).  However, various reports were published today from security firms and security related websites reminding users about the threats associated with continuing to run earlier versions of Adobe Flash Player.Read More...

In a story published at PCWorld.com yesterday, Symantec is blaming Microsoft for registry corruption after installing XP SP3

 http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,146228/article.html

Below is an article published yesterday on WIRED - it is a good article showing what is really happening in the computer forensics arena today.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/05/fbi_lab/

On March 4, 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed amendements to Regulation S-P: Privacy of Consumer Financial Inforamtion and Safeguarding Personal Information, which implements certain provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) for entities regulated by the Commission.  Comments were accepted through May 12th.  To read the proposal visit http://www.regulationsp.com/

I was testing Symantec Endpoint Protection for a short while. After uninstalling endpoint protection I began receiving an error every time that I opened outlook. The error said something to the effect of “Unable to load Add-on please uninstall”.

In Outlook 2003 you should be able to simply remove the add-on within the add-on manager. In Outlook 2007 though it requires a different method. I had to delete a file called Extend.dat (location: C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook) which is the file that stores the cached add-ons. After running Outlook again this file was recreated but this time Outlook did not give me an add-on error.  This seems to apply to other add-ons as well. While searching the web I saw people report that this also works for similar errors after uninstalling AVG antivirus.

The following article titled "Professional hackers attempt to 'copyright' viruses" was posted on statesman.com yesterday.

http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/05/05/0505techfiller.html

Google Blog has a good article "How to avoid getting hooked" by the Google Security Team as part of a series of posts devoted to online security.  In this particular post, they are focusing on phishing attacks and ways you can protect yourself.  To read the Blog article, go to http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-avoid-getting-hooked.html

The link below is an interesting article from the latest SANS NewBites email where attackers bribed gas station clerks to allow them to install skimmers inside the gas station’s card readers.  The British pound is worth about $2 US, so you can roughly double the numbers in the article to get U.S. currency. Read More...

I was working on a server that was running low on disk space on the system (C:) partition.  I was able to free up some space rather quickly (by removing the Automatic Update downloads), but when I checked the Event Logs, the Application log was filling up with errors from SMS for Exchange.  The message was that the virus definitions were corrupted.  It appeared that the XDB down script had run around lunch time and updated the virus definitions, but wasn’t able to complete the install due to low disk space.  Despite the partial install, SMS for Exchange appeared to be trying to use the corrupted definitions.  When I tried to run LiveUpdate (as recommended by the Event Log message), LiveUpdate said everything was current.  People were starting to have problems with their e-mail (and for some reason the server was beeping irregularly on site).  I stopped the SMS for Exchange service (which fixed the e-mail and the beep), but the service wouldn’t restart.  I tried restarting the main Antivirus service as well, and it would not restart (also because of corrupt virus definitions).  I had to manually stop all the Symantec services, remove the partially installed virus definitions from the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\VirusDefs folder, manually edit the USAGE.dat file (which tells the Symantec products which defs to use), then restart the services.  Once the services were up and running on the previous virus defs, I was  able to re-run the XDB down script and let it update the defs to the most current.