Well it is hard to believe that we are well into November and what a month it has been. With the recent Adobe password debacle where 150 million email addresses, their password hashes and the hints were exposed on the internet. Then there was Kiwicon, the New Zealand hacker conference in Wellington, where “AmmonRa” took us for a ride.

With the Christmas shopping season just around the corner many will be purchasing online and there are the usual reminders. Things to watch out for are nicely organised in this SANS article by Lenny Zeltser.

While you are shopping, perhaps this Microsoft blog article from Holly Stewart will encourage you to finally ditch your old XP computer. A couple of noteworthy points in the article are that XP is six times more likely to get infected than Windows 8, and when XP service pack 2 went out of support there was a huge disparity of infections as much as 66% higher than the supported XP service pack 3. So plan now to buy your Windows 8 replacement computer before it gets infected.