Gadgetopia

Lots of discussion on MacInTouch the last few days regarding the Opener malware that's been caught in the wild recently: Our take on the whole thing is that it's a Macintosh security wake-up call but not yet an immediate, widespread threat. The two most disturbing aspects are that malware apparently ...

Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible: Wow, fantastic. In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware ...

Is Windows inherently more vulnerable to malware attacks than OS X?: This is an extremely well-written and well-reasoned article explaining exactly why Windows is more vulnerable than OS X to malware. The author is obviously very familiar with the internals of both systems, and he explains very clearly where and ...

According to Stephan, certain features of Tiger's new Dashboard feature allow for the automatic installation of potentially evil widgets. I picked up [Tiger] at launch time from my local Apple store, brought it home, and got inspired to start in on a widget the next day. My flores and coras ...

Freeware Arena - 100% freeware since 1997 "Freeware is defined on FreewareArena as software that is available to download and use at no costs, is not shareware, not demos, not trials, and doesn't contain spyware, adware or any type of malware or any form of intrusive components..." Via LockerGnome.

Real Obnoxious: Another great rant about how crappy RealPlayer is. I agree with everything here RealPlayer borders on malware these days. ...playing video streams is only a very small aspect of what Real Player does; Real Player, most prominently, is a small bastard with inferiority complex and delusions of ...

From the 'It Was Bound To Happen' department: Symantec reports that a new virus is making the rounds that deletes all files on the infected PC: The malware targets Windows computers, and arrives in an email bearing the subject "Re" and an attachment that will have an .asp, .hta, .htm, ...

Here's a scary statistic that I hadn't considered before: SANS keeps a graph of the amount of time you can have an unprotected PC on the Internet before you get some kind of exploit probe. Since last year, this time has gone from 40-60 minutes down to around 20-30 minutes, ...

How to fix Mom's computer: Here's a great article on how to de-malware a computer. Gina from scribbling.net went home over the holidays and had to "fix" her mother's computer. She was so awesomely kind to write down everything she did, complete with screencaps. Related to this, the people in ...

I had to remove some nasty spyware yesterday from an employee's home machine. It was an IE search toolbar (I'm not going to say the name since I'd rather take a shotgun blast to the face than give them any publicity) that generated a JavaScript error on any search results ...