TrustMeSecurity.com

Friend and investor David Hawkins, President of Couleur NB, took the time to brave the blizzard-like conditions and introduce an equally brave Minister of Health, Hon. Mike Murphy. Murphy brought greetings on behalf of Premiere Shawn Graham and the Hon. Greg Byrne who had to cancel because of the storm.

The honourable Brian Murphy Member of Parliament for Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe could not be with us during our grand opening reception on January 28, 2008 - Parliament was open, so he sent TrustMe a much-appreciated video message instead.

MONCTON, NB - Minister of Business New Brunswick the Hon. Greg Byrne announced today that the government would be investing in job creation at Moncton based IT startup TrustMe Security, formerly known as VE Networks.

“Business New Brunswick is pleased to partner with TrustMe Security as they develop and market world class security products,” said Byrne. “TrustMe has grown quickly since setting up shop in the province in 2005. This assistance will allow the company to create more highly skilled jobs in New Brunswick and serve as an example to the IT industry that we’re open for business.”

Under the terms of the agreement the Government of New Brunswick will contribute a $1 million loan guarantee to stimulate the creation of over fifty jobs at the Moncton headquartered enterprise with satellite offices in Fredericton and Saint John.

Continue reading Government Invests in Job Creation at New Brunswick IT Startup

TrustMe for Outlook version v1.8.2.10 has been substantially rewritten to improve performance and reliability.

Known Issues

• 555- Users using Vista with Office 07 may experience an Outlook crash when receiving extremely long, highly formatted messages. A possible workaround if this problem is encountered is to attach the content as a separate file.
• 507 - If a message in Outlook has not been previously selected, right-clicking on the message and choosing ‘reply’ or ‘reply all’ will allow the user compose a reply. However they will not be able to send the response once it is composed. A workaround for this issue is to ensure the message already selected before right-clicking on it and choosing ‘reply’ or ‘reply all’.
• 1842 - A user cannot reset their password when changing their secret question with a very large answer (over 200 characters). A workaround to this issue is to limit your secret answer to 50 characters.
• 566 - In Outlook 2007, DRM, (Digital Rights Management) may appear to be functioning when in fact it is not.
• 256 - In every Outlook version, if a user has multiple email accounts configured for their Outlook profile, they cannot be guaranteed that Outlook will use the correct TrustMe for Outlook account to send their secure messages. A possible workaround for this problem is to set the TrustMe for Outlook account as your default Outlook account in your Outlook profile.

Continue reading Release Notes v1.8.2.10

News today that apparently Activision support has broadcast the email addresses of hundreds, perhaps thousands of users who submitted support requests.

According to kotaku.com:

In just one of the e-mails that was forwarded to us, an impressive 860 recipient e-mail addresses were listed in the mail’s ‘To’ field, ensuring that all who received updates on their replacement discs for the Wii version of Guitar Hero III had access to the e-mail addresses of the rest.

Read the rest of the article here. If you’re an Guitar Hero player and have needed Activision support in the past you may want to consider getting a new email address pronto.

An interesting story from The Other Paper. The article makes the case that MySpace’s new parental controls designed to safeguard children may also end up exposing the personally identifiable information of their parents. The argument is that it could be the beginning of the end for online anonymity - an opinion that may be a little premature.

News.com is carrying a story about a man who allegedly stored pornographic images of children on his work computer. According to the article the man stored the files in encrypted .Zip files. Luckily in this case the archive files were from an older version of WinZip and not WinZip 9.0 which uses much more secure 128- and 256-bit key AES encryption. The article author Declan McCullagh made an important point which made this story worth posting here.

The reason I’m mentioning this case is to argue that as encryption becomes more widespread–it’s part of OS X and Vista, after all–police will encounter it more frequently, and not just in cases involving illegal images. And not all encrypted files will be as easy to brute-force. Which means that the outcome of the Boucher case becomes more important than ever.

For those of you who haven’t been following this case, a Judge had previously ruled the man could not be forced to divulge encryption passphrase . As our technology makes advances so do the legal repercussions.

What a great headline. I admit it was stolen from a really fascinating blog post from Wired.com.

The posts details how the StormWorm botnet, a massive collection of personal computers from around the world who are unknowingly infected by a virus, has started to use these computers to solicit bank account passwords through phishing emails.

Every security geek’s favorite zombie computer army from 2007 — the Storm Worm botnet — has a new trick for 2008, using its huge collection of infected computers to send out phishing emails directing people to fake banking sites that it cleverly also hosts on the computers it remotely controls. The phishing campaign caught the attention of both F-Secure and Trend Micro, who say Storm has never been involved in phishing up to this point. The new campaign may indicate, according to F-Secure, that Storm’s controllers have figured out how to divide the massive army into clusters which it is now renting out to others.

Members of this zombie army probably have no idea their computers are being used to steal the bank accounts of their friends, families, co-workers and complete strangers. Click here to read the complete post.

The privacy commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart created her own list of new year’s resolutions to protect Canadians and Canadian businesses from increasingly dangerous threats to Canadians privacy rights.

Her 2008 list of suggested New Year’s resolutions for businesses in Canada:

1. Protect personal information with strong security. More than 162 million records were compromised by theft or loss in 2007, triple the number of data losses for the previous year, according to a USA Today analysis of breaches in the U.S., Canada and other countries. The disastrous breach involving Winner’s and HomeSense stores is an example of what can go wrong if businesses don’t invest in the latest security.

Click here for her complete list.

SecurityPark has an interesting report on a poll conducted with 455 IT executives in US SMBs, that reported that 42% said their networks were not secure even though the vast majority were using anti-virus, firewalls and spam filtering.

The study’s sponsor Andre Muscat, GFI’s Director of Engineering, said:

“Email viruses top the ‘greatest threat to network security’ list and this does not come as a surprise. It is one of the easier attack routes and this is confirmed by those respondents who reported a breach.”