The prevailing wisdom is that if you keep your operating system up to date with the latest security patches, and you run antivirus software, you're probably safe from malware. Unfortunately, that's just not true.

Consider yesterday's news that Trend Micro has discovered a new zero-day exploit in Adobe Reader. Who doesn't have Adobe Reader on their machine? If you have it, how careful are you about keeping it up to date? To be fair, the likelihood that you are going to try to open an infected PDF file is probably fairly small, but on the other hand, Adobe Reader is only one of probably hundreds of applications on your machine. As Mozilla recently discovered, thousands of Firefox users have potentially vulnerable older versions of Flash running on their machines.

So what's a responsible computer user to do? It's a difficult problem. Some software vendors are very responsible about pushing out updates to their software when needed. Others leave it in the user's hands. There are tools that will scan your machine and let you know when updates are available, but I'm not a big fan of these; I think users should know just what is changing on their system.

The best you can do is to be vigilant and consider your software at the same level you do the operating system when ensuring your machine is up to date. Obviously web-facing software or software that interacts with downloaded files are the biggest concern, and anything that is ubiquitous or incredibly popular, like Microsoft Office or your favorite browser.

What do you do to make sure your machine is as secure as you can make it?

[via InSecurity Complex]

What's the best anti-virus solution? Well, I dunno, but CNet does-it's running a review round-up of six major anti-virus apps: AVG Anti-Virus 7.1 Professional, CA eTrust EZ Antivirus 7.1, F-Secure Internet Security 2006, Kapersky Internet Security 6, McAfee VirusScan 2006, and Trend Micro PC-cillin 2006. The results may surprise you (I always wonder if I should put spoiler warnings on these things): PC-cillin comes out on top with a score of 7.8/10, followed by Kapersky and F-Secure in the low sevens. McAfee is surprisingly low, coming in fifth with a 6.0, and AVG brings up the rear with a 5.8. Head over to CNet to see full reviews for each product.

Makers of firewall and anti-virus software are warning that RSS feeds could be the next big thing for spreading viruses. In this article from The Register, Trend Micro's marketing manager says, "RSS feeds point to HTML pages and as such, they can be made to point to HTML-exploits or malicious JavaScript. It certainly can be a possible way of distributing malicious code over the internet to the subscribers of the RSS feed." Zone Labs, makers of ZoneAlarm, agree.

Personally, I don't buy it. It's not unlikely that such a vulnerability will be found in RSS readers in the near future, but as pointed out in the article, to be a useful medium for spreading a virus an RSS feed has to be very popular. But in order for a virus to get into a popular RSS feed, whomever is publishing the feed would have to insert the virus intentionally, or accidentally create a situation in which a third party could. Though not impossible, it seems like an unlikely confluence of circumstances.

Do you think Trend Micro and Zone Labs will be touting RSS scanning features in their upcoming anti-virus and firewall products?