This week, the Florida Free Culture student club hosted a three-day event in which they helped secure student-owned computers at the University of Florida campus by cleaning up malware infections and installing the university site-licensed antivirus software. The event was designed not only to help secure student computers, but to also promote free and open source software by providing educational handouts and installing a variety of applications, including Firefox, Thunderbird, the Gimp, OpenOffice, Pidgin, and more. Staffed completely by students -- myself being the exception -- we saw a lot of laptops over the three days in various states of needing software updates, including antivirus suites. If I were to guess how many machines had problematic antivirus installations, it would be close to 90 percent, with expired demo versions included with the initial laptop purchase, malware disabling the antivirus, and corrupted, partially uninstalled copies of antivirus due to an attempt to install another antivirus product.

At the Hack in the Box security conference in Malaysia Wednesday, Mandiant's Peter Silberman announced the release of Mandiant's newest free tool for incident response and forensic investigations. The tool, Memoryze, is the latest memory analysis tool for first responders to consider adding to their toolkit for acquiring physical memory from running Windows systems. This summer, we saw the release of several other tools to do the same thing, but they stopped short at providing the ability to acquire a forensic image (or copy) of physical memory. Memoryze goes further and provides advanced analysis capabilities of both physical memory from live, running Windows systems and memory images previously acquired from running systems.

Take a close look at today's edition of Dark Reading. Notice anything different? Take a closer look. We think you'll like what you see. After nearly three years of bringing you the best -- and the scariest -- of security news and information, Dark Reading has undergone a bit of a makeover. The changes we're making aren't drastic, and, as with most new releases, we're not guaranteeing they'll all work perfectly right out of the box. But we hope that in the end, the updates will make the site even more usable and helpful to our readers.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop: That's what I've been doing since last Thursday when Microsoft released the out-of-cycle MS08-067 bulletin and accompanying patches. It's more than a little nerve-wracking knowing that there is this vulnerability in machines within networks that you're responsible for but know that they can't all be patched right now due to various reasons and there is active exploitation of this vulnerability going on elsewhere in the world. What's most disturbing is that this is a vulnerability that allows a successful attacker to gain remote system-level privileges on a vulnerable Windows system.

Google designed Chrome to be faster, more stable and most importantly, more secure than other Web browsers. So with these features in mind, Google Chrome was built from scratch to be a Web browser designed for today's web application users. As more businesses venture into the cloud, it's becoming increasingly important that your browser doesn't crash when you're creating reports in Google Docs or when you're video conferencing. In order to prevent crashes, Google Chrome developers sandboxed each tab, so that if one tab malfunctions, the whole browser doesn't crash. If one tab does go down, a "sad tab" will appear depicting a ‘sad face' emoticon.

Earlier, I argued that wireless adoption in the enterprise, is, for the most part, a bad idea. I was pleased to get several interesting comments on my post, with a bunch of good critiques. In particular, "edyahoo" raised the point that it is far easier to complain about problems than to present constructive help for people living with the technology. So, thanks to edyahoo for that, and here's a list of my recommendations for using WiFi -- not WiMax, a very different system, thanks to GrendelsTeeth for clarifying that -- in a home or business environment.

What if you could boil all of the Internet's problems down to a few original issues -- what would you do with that information? Would it even be useful? What if it might help predict future Internet-shaking issues? I was at a malware conference last week, and I heard two interesting tidbits about the origins of some of the more social issues we currently face. The first is the concept of spam. Spam as a concept is actually accredited to Montgomery Ward. That's right, you can blame them -- sorta. They came up with the concept of mail-order catalogs in 1872. Those catalogs were sent not only to people who were already customers, but anyone they could get a catalog to. Back before the days of the Internet, phones and snail mail were the efficient methods of ordering. Fast forward 100 years, and we have the Internet. Sending bulk mail is no longer costly. I can do it electronically for fractions of a penny, instead of having to pay the heavy tax placed on that privilege by the post office. The only tax spammers have is the tax of getting connectivity, much of which they can steal. Which brings us to the second issue.

Usually, if you miss an industry event, you're out of luck. As Dark Reading winds up today's big virtual security event, though, I suddenly realize -- it's not over yet. "Risk, Protection, and Access: Mastering Today's Security Threats," originally held on Oct. 23, was the first-ever virtual conference co-produced by Dark Reading and our big sister publication, InformationWeek. Check out the video: