All the Security In The World Starts With YOU

I was just reading an article that indicated in a recent study, 50% of user passwords are easily guessable.  Do you know what the most popular password is?  123456 yes, that’s 123456.

I have been working with several Clients this week helping them with PCI compliance.  Tough stuff.  Ports on firewalls, encryption, properly update software, policies, etc, etc, etc.  And guess what, it’s all worthless!  If we can’t get users to create and use secure passwords, we can just stop all this other stuff and stop kidding ourselves.  Our business and personal data will never be secure.

I had a conversation with someone yesterday that told me he did not need a firewall at home because he is using a MAC.  He just wanted to be able to connect to the corporate network remotely.

As business owners and managers, we have not done our job educating our workforce on security related issues.  (Not to mention educated ourselves)  As individuals we are not taking security serious enough.  Data is lost and business/personal identities are stolen every day.  We need to do a better job with this stuff.  The most basic building block of any security strategy is the password.  It’s certainly not the only thing, but it is the foundation.  You can have all the security devices you want in your home.  If you leave the key in the front door, you’ve wasted your time and money.

By the way, what are your passwords?  

Problem with a Windows Update

One of the Windows Updates released Tuesday is causing BSODs and making the device not bootable.  The Update is MS10-015.  I have disabled the update on our monitoring system.   So Clients that get the updates from us will not be affected. However, Clients that self update could have problems.  So far it looks like only Windows XP is affected and it appears that the affected machines may be in fact infected with malware that causes the problem.  Microsoft has pulled the update from Windows Update and Microsoft Update.

Office 2010 Pricing and Requirements

Office 2010 is expected to be released by June of this year.  From everything I am reading and seeing, I believe that the June date is accurate and that it may even ship sooner.  The product looks pretty good as it is right now.

There will be 4 versions of Office 2010

Home and Student	$149.00
Home and Business	$279.00
Professional	$499.00
Professional Academic	$99.00

These are retail prices.  There will be upgrade pricing and of course quantity discounts.   And lower, OEM pricing when Office is purchased with a new computer.

For most of our Clients, either the Home and Business or the Professional version will be what you would purchase.  Home and Business includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook.  The Professional version includes all that plus Publisher and Access.

The requirements for Office 2010 are pretty much the same as for Office 2007.  The processor needs to be at least 500Mhz, memory needs to be at least 256M and available disk must be at least 2.5G.  Of course, these are not what we would suggest by any means!  Our minimum configuration is 1.5GHz processor, 2G memory and 5G available disk space.

Office 2010 will be available in both 32 and 64 bit versions.  The 32 bit version will run on Windows versions back to XP SP3.  While the 64 bit version requires at least Windows Vista SP1.

Office 2010 is a very nice product.  There are a lot of enhancements and I believe it is easier to use than previous versions.  I will be posting info on each of the Office 2010 modules here over the next couple of months.

Microsoft Office Patent Infringement Issue

A while back, Microsoft was sued by a Canadian software company for a patent infringement on some code in the Office products that has to do with Custom XML, which most of us would never see or use.  Microsoft lost the suit and appealed.  This week they lost the appeal and must issue new versions of Word and Office or stop selling it by January 11, 2010.

This has caused some concern from a few of our Clients.  However, it is nothing to worry about.  Microsoft has already corrected the issue and will have the corrected versions of Word 2007 and Office 2007 available by the January 11th date.  Office 2010, scheduled for release in June of 2010 does not contain the affected code.  Existing installations of Word and Office are not affected by the ruling.

Serious Adobe PDF Exploit

A serious exploit of Adobe PDF files has been discovered and malicious PDF files are being detected on the Internet since December 11th or so.

There is no patch for this issue at this time and anti-virus applications are not yet able to detect the malware due to how it is packaged. 

The problem appears to be in a JavaScript function inside of Adobe.  If you know how, you can disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader.  (Edit – Preferences – JavaScript – uncheck Enable Acrobat JavaScript).  Note that this may mean some PDFs do not display or act correctly, but it will mitigate the current issue.  Once a patch has been released you can turn it back on if you want.

Of course you should be careful downloading any type of file from the Internet.  However, be extra careful with PDFs at the moment.  Once a patch is released, we will post another article here.