SecTor 2009 - Early bird registration ends tomorrow

Hurry up and register before May 1 or the price goes up.
SecTor (short for Secure Toronto, I believe) is a conference for Information Security folks in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

It is Oct. 6 & 7 this year, with training courses on the 5th for those who desire a bit of heavy duty security training before the conference. The training on the 5th is in any one of these topics:

Session Title	Presenter	Cost	Link
Securing your Microsoft Infrastructure	Brian Bourne CMS Consutlting Inc.	$999	Register
Understanding Web Application Attacks	Security Compass	$999	Register
Auditing systems and networks with Backtrack 4	The Academy	$999	Register
Data Forensics – Essentials for Survival	Robb Beggs, Digital Defence Larry Gagnon, Forensicom	$999	Register

Currently you can get admission to the 2 day conference for only $499 After May 1st it goes up to $749. ...and for the really tardy, tickets will be available at $999 after Sept. 1st. (if there are still tickets to be had)

(Hint: TASK [Toronto Area Security Klatch] has a 10% off coupon to reduce that price even further, but I 'm not going to tell you what it is, if you really want it you can find out for yourself.)


SecTor 2009 Tickets are Limited!
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER NOW

Big news for fans of Windows.

Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott reveal a new Windows 7 application compatibility feature called Windows XP Mode here.

Basically, any owner of a copy of Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate (which covers just about everyone who will be using it in a corporate environment, and a lot of home users). will be entitled to download what is essentially a copy of Windows XP in a virtual machine that will run in parallel with Windows 7, seamlessly integrating it's windows and icons with the host Windows 7 ones, thereby relieving Microsoft of the need to keep old code in Windows 7 and future versions for compatiblity with old software. If it won't run in windows 7 you install it as an XP compatibility install and it runs in XP on top of Windows 7.

Microsoft prepping IE8 auto update

Microsoft is preparing to roll out IE8 to IE6 and IE7 users via autoupdate "on or about the third week of April".

IE8 will be available to WSUS in July 2009.

Visit the Microsoft IE blog for more info.

Twitter hit by a worm on Saturday

A worm infected Twitter on Saturday April 11, 2009.

The worm seems to have originated at the StalkDaily.com site, as it seems that it's main purpose is to direct people there. Twitter warned people against visiting the site or linking to it.

The worm sends spam tweets from the infected person's account that direct others to the StalkDaily site. Simply visiting the profile page of an infected user can lead to one's own profile getting infected.

If you have been locked out of your twitter account due to this worm, you need to do a password reset as Twitter has locked some infected accounts.

Twitter claims to have now fixed the security hole that enabled this worm, and that no passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack.

Ubuntu 9.04 ...just around the corner

Also, Ubuntu 7.10 reaches end-of-life on April 18, 2009