The Security Mentor

(Disclosure: there's a business relationship between me and Watchguard: they bought an article from me once).

You know not to download software from places you don't trust, kind of like you don't eat sandwiches you find in the street. Unfortunately, sometimes a security bug will result in your downloading software without meaning to simply by visiting a bad web site, or a good web site taken over by bad people, or a good web site running ads from bad people.

That's the subject of the Watchguard video about drive-by downloads. It's pretty good, but assumes you know some technical terms. For example, their narrator Corey Nachreiner talks about using a packet sniffer to watch what was going on between the computer he sacrificed and the attacking web site. A "packet sniffer" is just a program that watches and reports what traffic is going over the network.

How is it for accuracy? Great. I didn't find a single nitpick about points of fact. That's impressive. I'm a master nitpicker.

How's their advice? Pretty good. They advise using some of Internet Explorer's settings to block common avenues of attack. When they say "white list", they're talking about the "Trusted Sites" zone in IE's security settings. Their advice is what I used to do before realizing that nobody security-conscious can use IE for general web browsing.

The video is part of a service they offer their customers, so of course it also explains how you can use their equipment to block some attacks from nasty web sites.

Worth checking out, especially if you have a learning style that works better with video than with text.