New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing
350344
To see the e-mail I get every day from readers about security issues is to develop a deep discomfort with the state of computing today.
198990
A free web browser that promises users total  privacy whilst surfing on the web has been released.
537005
New site is designed to spur development of OS for improved mobile Web surfing, networking, power management, user interface, more.
654308
Some years ago, I got a job doing network support for the District Attorneyâs office in a large city that shall remain nameless. When I arrived, the network was a mess! Malware was rampant, Internet and WAN connections were saturated, and users were constantly complaining about slow computers and network performance. Even so, my attempts to enforce a mindful security policy were met with fierce resistance. The attitude among the legal staff was, âThis is my computer and my network; youâre just a computer janitor.â
22770
Unpatched Windows machines are vulnerable to latest adware attack
337538
How far is too far when it comes to the freedom of software? Plus: Palm slipping, Windows sliding.
466879
Also: Privacy: The problem that won't go away. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
22759
Also: Gadget lets parents track kids' every move. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
7972
Blog: New behavior-monitoring protection for the desktop is designed to compliment features in existing Symantec products.
56532
People have long been the weakest link when it comes to protecting computers. The same applies to mobile phones, a security expert says.
729820
Scammers and hackers are targeting the human factor in system setups. Part of a series on hot security topics.
91685
Many of you can't be trusted with your own computers. Stupidity isn't the problem. It's laziness, mostly, combined with a penny-wise stinginess that resents the $40 price of a good antivirus program.
211846
The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.These Web-based attacks, called &quot;drive-by downloads&quot; by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore&#39;s An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim&#39;s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim&#39;s PC. &quot;The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.Some of the data surprised Provos.&quot;When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,&quot; he said.It turns out the Web&#39;s nice neighborhoods aren&#39;t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.&quot;We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher,&quot; he said. But &quot;there really wasn&#39;t a huge difference.&quot;&quot;Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn&#39;t good enough,&quot; he noted.Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google&#39;s research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. &quot;They&#39;re the Kleenex Web sites,&quot; he said. Criminals &quot;know they&#39;re going to be shut down, and they don&#39;t care.&quot;Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.So how to stop this growing pestilence?Google&#39;s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. &quot;You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,&quot; he said.But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. &quot;I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,&quot; for the problem to go away, he said.
405976
Letters: Going deeper on the question of security and operating systems.
148648
Our colleagues over at PC World gathered up a list of products that each of them simply couldn't imagine going through daily life without. Some are relatively obvious, such as Windows 2003,  TiVO and Skype, and others a bit more odd, such as Cyber Systems' RoboForm. Heh?
673455
By Randy Myers, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.  May 29--In hopes of making the Internet a safer place for children, concerned parents tap into a multitude of resources.
331142
A few months ago I wrote about Web browser hijacking. It&#39;s a problem a lot of computer users are facing these days. You open your Internet Explorer, but instead of being directed to your homepage, you&#39;re sent to some search engine you&#39;ve never heard of.