Last day to save $500 for SANS San Diego 2013

SANS NewsBites - Volume: IV, Issue: 53

*************************************************************************
SANS NewsBites                     December 30, 2002                    Volume: IV, Issue: 53
*************************************************************************
TOP OF THE NEWS

  24 December 2002 Stolen DoD Contractor Computer Equipment Contains Personal Data
  21 & 23 December 2002 Internet Monitoring Center Won't Spy on Citizens

THE REST OF THE WEEK'S NEWS

  27 December 2002 ID Thief Turns Extortionist
  26 December 2002 Kroger Co. is Testing Fingerprint Payment System
  26 December 2002 CMU Researchers Developing Software to Weed Out Bot e-Mail Accts
  26 December 2002 South Carolina Computer Crime Center Established
  24 December 2002 TSA Documents' Protection Easily Circumvented
  23 December 2002 Microsoft Auto Update Proves Frustrating
  23 December 2002 Securing e-Mail in Outlook


******** This Issue Sponsored by VeriSign - The Value of Trust ********
FREE E-COMMERCE SECURITY GUIDE
Is your e-business built on a strong, secure foundation? Find out
with VeriSign's FREE White Paper, "Building an E-Commerce Trust
Infrastructure." Learn how to authenticate your site to customers,
secure your web servers with 128-Bit SSL encryption, and accept secure
payments online.
Click here: http://www.verisign.com/cgi-bin/go.cgi?a=n20390113340057000
***********************************************************************

TOP OF THE NEWS

nb" [readonly] 222L, 9032C update system.

-http://www.nyq.eweek.com/article2/0,6071,801273,00.asp
[Editor's Note (Shpantzer): Updates for the Office suite are sometimes impossible without the physical CD's, which many users have not retained or never owned (pirated software or legitimate software on second-hand hardware). This leaves millions of systems out of the update process and puts the rest of us downrange from their unpatched applications. (Schultz): I've never been very enthusiastic about Microsoft Auto Update. Too often users who rely on this feature find out later that patches they thought had been automatically installed were not installed at all. If you look at Microsoft's web site, you'll see many postings about types of update failures that occur and a variety of solutions, all of which are bound to confuse the average user. (Murray): Even rocket science can be mastered. If AOL can do it routinely without even evoking comment, then Microsoft can learn. ]


23 December 2002 Securing e-Mail in Outlook
The second of two articles about securing Microsoft Outlook focuses on securing e-mail, including blocking unsafe files, changing system settings and turning on file extensions.
-http://online.securityfocus.com/infocus/1652




THE REST OF THE WEEK'S NEWS

===end===
NewsBites Editorial Board:
Kathy Bradford, Roland Grefer, Bill Murray, Stephen Northcutt, Alan
Paller, Marcus Ranum, Eugene Schultz and Gal Shpantzer
Please feel free to share this with interested parties via email,
but no posting is allowed on web sites. For a free subscription,
(and for free posters) e-mail sans@sans.org with the subject:
Subscribe NewsBites