Irongeek and Glj12 have released a new tool for windows that ranomizes your windows MAC address and host name. This makes a host running this software extremely hard to track.

For more information see : http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/madmacs-mac-spoofer

From Tuaw.com

Remember those hackers in the Washington Post story who claimed to have hacked a MacBook's wireless drivers to gain control of it? Then remember the follow-up story where the author, Brian Krebs basically, um, how shall I say: 'slightly falsified' his way through backing up the original story with excuses that the flaw does exist in Apple's drivers, but Apple 'leaned' on them not to publicize this so they decided to use a 3rd party card? Finally, remember how, in the original article, David Maynor, one of the hackers, is quoted saying "We're not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those 'Get a Mac' commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something." Boy, that sure doesn't betray any sense of 'I am going to lie, cheat and steal to prove whatever I want' bitterness, does it?

See entire article by David Chartier at www.tuaw.com

ScatterChat was released Saturday July 22, 2006 by the hacktivismo arm of the cult of the dead cow at the sixth hope. Simply speaking scatterchat is a branch or fork off of the Gaim instant messaging platform that promises high security though its use of TOR and through its use of hard encryption (ElGamal, AES) (More on the crypto here: http://scatterchat.com/docs/crypto_protocol.txt)

Williamc and Twinvega have created a video introduction on how to use the linux tools DD and Autopsy from the Auditor Security Collection knoppix boot cd.

Check it out at:
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/autopsy1

Today various news sources reported that Antivirus and computer security company Sophos is telling its users to dump pc's and get macs.

From: http://www.tgdaily.com/

"Computer users tired of spyware and viruses should consider switching to Macintosh computers, says Sophos in its new "Security Threat Management Report." The report ranks the top ten malware threats of the past six months along with outline current and future security threats. Hacker primarily target Windows machines and the report claims the Macintosh will continue to be a "safer place," at least for a while."?

This is bad advise any way you look at it. Consumers shouldn't be spending more money on anouther product they know very little about, home users should be spending more time learning about these threats and how to combat them.

Combating these threats on the PC may eventully be very similar to doing so on the mac platform. There is no built in 100% safe guard in the mac platform that prevents it from being attacked by viruses and malware.

The bottom line, whether you use a mac or a pc, you should be using a firewall, you should be checking for updates at least weekly, and you should know the security basics of your operating system, the same can be said for linux. Using an alternate operating system doesn't increase security, it actully decreases it because new users are less likely to know how to secure it.

Related information for securing windows XP:
Microsoft 6 steps to help secure your brand-new PC
Security Essentials for Windows XP without Service Pack 2

Before following this guide a complete ad-ware and virus scan should be completed to verify the system you plan on using is free from viruses and other malicious software. AVG virus scan is free for personal use and is available directly from AVG here: http://free.grisoft.com/

Ad Aware & Spy-bot search and destroy are both free for personal use and will identify any malicious software that may be running on your windows based computer.
Ad aware can be downloaded here: http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Spy-bot Search and Destroy can be downloaded here: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Zeroday Security Solutions has agreed to sponsor Topsight in furthing its goal of providing security insight to the masses.

For more information on ZeroDay Secure Solution see: http://www.zerodayss.com

According to a Register.co.uk news report Jerry A. Taylor is a complete idiot:

"The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server.

This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city's web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town's IT infrastructure.

Read more at TheRegister

Or visit Tuttle, OK's website at cityoftuttle.org

http://onmac.net/ has ended its contest for a the first working solution to running windows on an intel mac. According to the site Blanka and Narf came up with the solution and won almost 14,000.00 . There solution posted in downloadable form is avalable at http://onmac.net/

How effective is your tin foil helmet? Various students at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT have asked that very question and as you'll see have finally anwsered it.

See: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/ for more info.