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Comodo Firewall Pro gets a major revision from its publisher, upgrading to version 3 with some significant changes. Most importantly, user complaints about resource hogging when version 2 came out have been all but eradicated with the new model.

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There is absolutely no question that large organizations are growing more and more concerned about data privacy and security. In fact, a recent ESG Research survey reveals that security professionals rate "protecting confidential/private data" as the biggest influence on their security management needs--more important than regulatory compliance or corporate governance. The survey was based on a recently released Enterprise Strategy Group report titled "Security Management Matures," which I co-authored.

Obviously, product demand should be healthy but suppliers may be facing a tougher market because of growing consolidation in the data loss prevention market. The market … Read more

Those of you who haven't yet installed a link scanning or Web site rating program for your Firefox or IE-based browser should hop to it--and consider using LinkScanner Lite when you do.

I've been using LinkScanner Lite and McAfee Site Adviser on both Firefox and IE browsers. Overkill? No way. Each program serves the greater goal of alerting you to dangerous links but differ in their approaches.… Read more

Japanese car makers continue to keep us in work here at CNET car tech. Just when you thought that today's models had as much gadgetry onboard as possible, along comes Infiniti with its 2008 EX35, a model that introduces two brand new car technology features. The EX35 is the first production car to come with Around View Monitor, a camera-based parking aid that gives drivers a top-down surround view of the car and any obstacles in its vicinity. It is also the first car in the United States to come with a nonemergency active safety feature in the form … Read more

As a previous generation of children was given the blanket advice "Don't talk to strangers," today's kids are told "never give out your personal information online." A new study suggests that this well-intentioned advice is not sufficient to protect children from unwanted sexual solicitation and harassment. The study comes to the controversial conclusion that sharing information online is not correlated with victimization. Many other online safety experts maintain that privacy protection is always a good first line of defense, though clearly not the only step.

The study, published in the February 2007 issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine and reported by the AP, found that victimization is likely to be associated with online behavior such as talking about sex with people met online, or intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet. … Read more

As the automated Mpack attack continues to turn thousands of legitimate Web sites into compromised sites offering drive-by downloads of malicious software, security researcher Roger Thompson over at Exploit Prevention Labs reminds us there are other exploits compromising legitimate sites, and some are as easy to find as entering a simple search string on Google. For more than a week (starting before the current Mpack attack), Thompson has been posting a list of dangerous search strings on his blog site. I've collected these and indicated in parentheses some of the known exploits associated.