Peter Cullen has the unenviable task of safeguarding the privacy of Microsoft and its customers

As the chief privacy strategist for Microsoft, Peter Cullen has an onerous responsibility. Microsoft software routinely collects information from millions of computers around the world, quietly and often without the owner’s explicit knowledge.

Harvesting this kind of private information may seem intrusive, but Microsoft claims it is done for a good reason — the more information the company has on users, the better it can protect them.

Cullen moved to Microsoft three years ago from financial services where he helped develop the industry’s best practices around the collection and use of information.

ZDNet UK talked to him about ID theft, the increasing threat of phishing attacks and combating the ever-present menace of spam

When having just one user working on your computer it is sometimes more convenient to tell Windows to auto log on to your machine without asking for user name and password.

Although not recommended for security reasons you might want to tell Windows to Auto log on using your user name and password.

In order to do that follow these steps:

1. Go to Start->Run
2. Type “Control USERPASSWORDS2”
3. Uncheck Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer
4. Click OK
5. Now you’ll get a new Dialog. Type the User name and Password for the user you want to Auto Log On as
6. Click OK

Next time your computer reboots Windows will automatically log on as the account you selected.

McAfee plans to release on Tuesday a new tool designed to help users identify vulnerabilities in Web services applications. The WSDigger tool was developed by McAfee’s Foundstone security services group and lets users test the security of Web services, the company said in a statement.

WSDigger will be released to the open-source community, McAfee said. The tool comes with sample attack plug-ins for SQL injection, cross-site scripting and X-PATH injection attacks. In addition, people can develop and share their own plug-ins, the security vendor said. WSDigger should be available Tuesday for download from the Foundstone Web site.

Source: News.com