Microsoft has decided to issue a special patch outside its usual patchday rhythm for all its Internet Explorer versions to close a severe vulnerability issue. Downloads of Firefox have accordingly skyrocketed.

The Apache Foundation had its big conference November 2-6 in Portland OR and Linux Pro Magazine was there with its camera. To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the foundation, some highlights from the comprehensive program of talks are available for free in our video archives now.

Just a couple of hours after completing this article, Charly headed off on vacation. Before he left, he indulged in a spot of piercing to help him work around the paranoid firewalls waiting for him in the Internet cafes at his holiday location.

This month we look into the intruder's toolkit and investigate some prudent counter-measures for detecting and preventing attacks.

Security fixes address a few vulnerabilities in Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.

Google's Ratproxy is a free testing tool that searches for security problems in web applications.

At the CanSecWest Vancouver 2009 conference's PWN2OWN hacker's competition the Safari, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox browsers were successfully hacked to run code on their systems. The Chrome browser was recognized as being the least impacted by the hackers.

Security tester ProCheckUp has found critical bugs in Novell's GroupWise WebAccess that could allow e-mail theft.