Security Notes

• Whenever I read or hear people arguing that government needs to “step in” on cybersecurity (I’m looking at you, Mark Russinovich), I caution them to wait until the government stops screwing up so badly.  Private-sector computer security is weak, but their public-sector counterparts are definitely not better in this regard.
• Keeping software up to date is one of the easiest things you can do to protect yourself.  Your web browser is probably the single most important piece of software to keep up to date, because it is typically your primary link to the outside world.  So obviously, it makes perfect sense that people don’t update their web browsers.  Actually, to be fair, a lot of these are probably from companies that don’t keep up to date on browsers, like organizations which have employees still running IE 7 or 8, or single-digit Firefox versions.  Modern browsers tend to update themselves automatically (although IE doesn’t), but if you run in a virtualized environment or have Windows Update controlled by group policy, you might be forced into out-of-date browsers.
• I guess hacking Sony has become passe.