Halloween is not a big deal down under. Certainly when I was a kid, nobody celebrated halloween, but these days it is starting to pop up more and more. What does Halloween have to do with security you ask? Well it seemed quite apt that on Halloween night I saw this article from computerworld on how 48% of surveyed companies plan to run XP post Microsoft end-of-support in 2014.

Now if that isn't scary I don't know what is! While I can understand the pain in the need to to test applictions, run a pilot group, train users in a new interface and finally roll out a new desktop OS, I suspect it pales in comparison to getting your desktop fleet pwned by the first never-to-be-patched-in-your-OS vulnerability on April 9th 2014.

Don't get me wrong. I liked XP. It did what was needed and was a solid OS. It was rock solid enough to make it's successor, Vista, look like crap. I still have it running on one machine at home. But Windows 7 is no Vista. IMO it's worth the switch. Anyway by 2014 I doubt I'll even still be using Windows 7, (with plans for Windows 8 in 2012) let alone a 13 year old OS!

I don't care how much you 'like it', continuing to use WinXP post april 2014 for your desktops is just asking for trouble. Think about it.... a 13 year old OS. That's akin to using Windows 95 in 2008. Or continuing to use Windows 98 until next year.

Now that's scary!

It's been a busy time under the Security Circus Big Top of late which has led to a distinct lack of blogging.

But what busy time it has been in the InfoSec world! What with Intel buying McAfee for almost $8 billion and Snoop Dog declaring "Hack is Whack!" (which is how the cool kids, in this case Symantec Norton and Snoop, say "please don't commit cybercrimes").

It's been a tumultuous time here down under, with a deadlocked parliment after a recent Federal Election meaning we're in Governmental limbo which must somehow be the cause of the recent week of system outages amongst financial institutions such as the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ Bank and not to be outdone, Westpac. I can only assume the National Australia Bank (or 'NAB' as they prefer to be called these days) will have an outage tomorrow, as the 'big four' banks like to do everything together*. Not to be left out, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) also has a minor outage today. Whatever happened to testing patches? Hmmm.

Time fo' me to bounce off to my crib with my homeys and bust some phat cyphers to win that grand prize and meet Snoop!

Waitaminute.... "2 tickets to Snoop concert, meet his mgmt/agent, Toshiba Laptop"

Meet his mgmt/agent?

Weak? fo'shizzle!

*for the non-Australians, these four major banks have been accused of interest rate collusion in the past...

Looks like Adobe have recognized the need to organize their security efforts! I guess with all the recent bad press about security holes in Acrobat and Adobe Reader they've decided to get organized. Aligning their 'patch day' with Microsoft's patch tuesday is a nice touch and helps make life that little bit easier for the administrators out there. No comment on their blog about it, but I hope this quarterly 'patch tuesday' also includes flash....

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