Today, An Excerpt

As I surf the tech websites for news that's pertinent to us here at West Coast, and to you, the reader, I come across a blurb that reinforces an idea that I've had for a long time: "You cannot rely on one source of protection. The best protection is information."

Read this. I found this on Slashdot.

An anonymous reader notes that this weekend, ReadWriteWeb discovered a security hole on several McAfee sites, which lets any attacker piggyback on the company's reputation and brand in order to distribute malware, Trojans, or anything else. The submitter adds an ironic coda to McAfee's epic fail: "In the 'how to HTML Injection' section, the author provided the four steps needed to execute a simple, no-brainer injection, but unfortunately, exposed a hole in NY Times website when they republished the article. While the author changed the offending text to an image, the Times is still using the original story which redirects directly to ReadWriteWeb [via XSS]." From the RWW post: "During tests this weekend, we discovered the company who claims to 'keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud...' has several cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and provides the bad guys with a brilliant — albeit ironic — launching pad from which to unleash their attacks."

I think this says enough, but just in case, let me get to the point of this. No system is perfect. It would not be a system if it were. In that, flaws are inherent, and constantly being found, and fixed. Keep your anti-virus up-to-date. Keep your Windows patches up-to-date, and if you run OSX, make sure you keep up with the system updates. They're released for a reason, and each of these operating systems has features that will issue these updates automatically. For some businesses, this is not the best policy, and should be determined by your System Admin. For you home users, however, in most cases it is in your best interest to allow patches to be applied automatically. The quicker the patch is applied, the better.

If you're not sure that your system is up-to-date, or if you'd just like to have someone make sure, stop by our website @ www.westcoastitsolutions.net . You can also drop us a line at contact@westcoastitsolutions.net , or you can reach us through any of the social sites listed at the top-right corner of this blog. Stay safe, world.