Month: January 2010
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Adventures in Linux distro land
The number of articles lately concerning the overwhelming amount of Linux distributions available is quite interesting; why now? Perhaps because Linux on the desktop is becoming a little more mainstream. Or perhaps because of the miriad number of embedded devices that use Linux ( think home automation, signage boards, NAS storage, netbooks, phones, radios, media…
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IE in trouble again
Only a day after the last patch was released for IE that fixed problems relating to the Google ( and other ) attacks from December, a number of new vulnerabilities have been found in IE ( no version details yet ) which when combined, can lead to remote execution on a Windows PC. Core Security…
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The Internet is a BIIIIIG place!
We take a lot of what happens on the Internet for granted but the numbers that make up the Internet are staggering to say the least. Here’s a small subset from 2009 of what goes on out there: 247 billion emails per day 81% of email is spam ( that’s 200 billion per day )…
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Widespread Attacks on IE bug start
The first widespread attack to leverage a recently patched flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has surfaced. Starting late Wednesday, researchers began spotting dozens of Web sites that contain the Internet Explorer attack, which works reliably on the IE 6 browser, running on Windows XP. The attack installs a Trojan horse program that is able…
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Firefox 3.6 released
The Mozilla Foundation is releasing the latest and greatest version of its Web browser, Firefox 3.6.
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17-year old security hole in all Windows versions
I sometimes feel as if I’m picking on Microsoft for its crappy security ( there’s always some new hole to talk about ) but then I sit back and realise that their products really do have poor security and I don’t need to feel ashamed for reporting on it. For example, a Google engineer recently…
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Microsoft Internet Explorer security patches released
Microsoft on Thursday issued a cumulative critical patch for Internet Explorer that fixes eight vulnerabilities, including a hole targeted in the China-based attacks on Google and other U.S. companies. The security update is rated critical for all supported releases of IE 5, 6, 7, and 8, according to the advisory. The more severe vulnerabilities could…
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‘Dump Internet Explorer’ says France
It seems it wasn’t only the Germans who thought it necessary to suggest the use of a browser alternative to IE – the French Certa agency ( which looks after cyber threats in France ) have now weighed in on the matter and suggested the same. And they’ve included all versions of IE in this…
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Microsoft breaks Perl CPAN testers system
As if Microsoft hasn’t got it’s hands full enough with security breaches in it’s software aiding the Chinese in attacks on US companies, it has now been implicated in DoS attacks on the Perl CPAN testers’ system of sites, databases and mirrors. The problem appears to be that Microsoft’s bots do not adhere to the…
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Google, China and security
A drama of world-wide proportions ( that wouldn’t out of place in a Hollywood blockbuster ) has been playing out over the last week concerning Google’s operations in China. It all started with denial of service attacks against Google’s Gmail service in late December last year ( and attacks against about about 30 other US…
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Acrobat Reader security issues
A(nother) vulnerability in Acrobat Reader 9.2 has forced Adobe to fix it with an update to 9.3. This problem has been assigned CVE-2009-4324 and there are exploits out in the wild. So upgrade asap.
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2010 Date Programming snafus
Y2K was an interesting time with the prophets of doom out in full force. And yes while there were some issues, it wasn’t quite the end of the world as we knew it. 2010 however came up on us very quietly from a date problem p.o.v. but there have been some fairly major issues worldwide…
