security

Firefox has several security settings you can use to keep your computer safe. There are also hundreds of extensions that you can add to give you further privacy & security. Lisa Hoover has written a great article on a few of these extensions. For example a good way to protect your computer is to prevent the browser from using JavaScript at Web sites without permission, the NoScript extension makes every site that uses JavaScript ask your permission before running it. It can render some JavaScript-heavy sites unreadable but provides a whitelist of acceptable sites that you can add to speed up your surfing experience.

At Jethro the extensions we always install on any new pc are, Plain old favourites, Session Manager, Tab Browser Preferences and Delicious.

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in Microsoft
Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft
Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2000, and Microsoft Excel 2004 for
Mac. At this time, our initial investigation indicates that customers who are
using Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac, or who have
installed Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 3 are not affected by this
vulnerability.

This vulnerability cannot be exploited on Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service
Pack 3, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Service Pack 1,
or Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac.

Full details Microsoft Security Advisory (947563)

Meryl Evans has written a rather long story on everyday security. She
discusses barriers in the way of organisations getting their security
right and some solutions to these problems. I think the most important
thing from this article are the ten cost-effective security measures
Meryl talks about. These are:

• Firewalls with an Intrusion Prevention System
• Secure email filtering gateways
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I spent 3 hours in the weekend cleaning viruses and trojan horses out of a friend's computer. They had popups happenning galore and the pc was running so slow because of all the applications that were loading at start time it almost wasn't functioning at all.

The worst thing, they had been sold the PC and Windows XP and Office 2003 by some dodgy backyard bloke who had given them illegal unlicensed software, though they were unaware of that fact.

I am busy upgrading all our websites. both our company and personal ones and all our customers sites. there have been a number of security issues on the web lately with both Drupal and IE. See this story about Badware on Ethans blog - this is similar as to what happened to this site about a week after I launched it.

Fortunately I found the problem almost immediately and was able to delete the hacked scripts. However they kept coming back and I couldn't figure out how. I changed the administrator password and that stopped them. Then I upgraded the site and the problem has now gone away.