How safe is instant messaging?

Monday, June 9th, 2008

The number of interested parties eager to listen in on your online conversations, including what you type through instant messaging, has never been higher. It's trivial to monitor unencrypted wireless networks and snatch IM passwords as they flow through the ether. Broadband providers and their business partners are enthusiastically peeking into ...

HTTP Proxies Bypass Firewalls

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

This may seem painfully obvious to some people, but I looked around and couldn’t find a reference to it, so I apologize ahead of time for anyone who already knew this. When we normally think of how attackers use proxies they are almost always just trying to hide their IP ...

Troubleshooting Windows Update Issues with Vista

Monday, April 21st, 2008

If you are having problems getting certain updates installed on Vista, there are two places you can look to troubleshoot: %windir%\windowsupdate.log, a log file for Windows Update events %windir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log, a log file that tracks events to the servicing stack These log files include the following fields: Time/Date Stamp, Message Severity, Message Source, Operation ...