Archive for May, 2006

Google Site: search issues

Friday, May 19th, 2006

This is interesting…. there’s been a lot of frustration among some (myself included) with the current state of Googles site indexing. For a good while I’ve been able to consistently find ANY post on my site using google if I quote a certain amount of text that I know is on the page. Currently, such […]

Computer security day….

Friday, May 19th, 2006

A few days ago – while musing about the botnet take-down of Blue Security – I said something along the lines of “Make sure your pc’s are clean from “bugs” and help your friends do likewise. Spread the word, we need a “worldwide clean your computer with antivirus and antispyware day” or something like it. […]

Zero-day ( 0-day) Microsoft Word exploit

Friday, May 19th, 2006

There was some news on this last night at Incidents.org, today F-secure has some details as well on the trojan that’s dropped in this circulating, exploit. It seems as though the initial attack was very targetted against a specific organization. Antivirus packages did not recognize the trojan that the exploit file dropped as of yesterday, […]

Trackback spam and countermeasures like Akismet and trackback validation

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

As I’ve already commented today…. there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I’ve now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on another two sites. Akismet has been very impressive in defending this attack. Only 1% of the […]

Microsoft Vista hardware requirements…

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

Microsoft has started releasing details of the hardware requirements for the upcoming release of Vista. It appears there are two categories of requirements. One is a bare minimum for vista, the other is a minimum for Vista Premium. They’re calling the specs Vista Capable and Premium Ready…    Send article as PDF   

I’ve NEVER liked UPNP…. now I have another reason….

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

I remember the first Windows XP vulnerability was a Upnp vulnerability. I have made one of my first visits on any new XP system a visit to grc.com to disable it on an XP workstation. But, it’s the great thing – makes life so much easier for setting up network devices. “You just don’t like […]

RealVNC 4.1.1 and prior exploits on the loose

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

As reported over the last several days, there is a critical problem with RealVNC 4.1.1, there is NOW an exploit in the wild for RealVNC 4.1.1, that SANS is looking for more information on. There are updates from RealVNC for all affected product lines. Other VNC implementations have not been reported to be affected. Only […]

Another trackback spam storm overnight….

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

All of the the swarms of trackback spam seemed to last an hour give or take a few minutes, so it does look kind of like “rent-a-bot” activity, lots of different IP addresses, trackback spam sites seem to have a common theme – the last batch was insurance type sites…. a sampling of about three […]

Speaking of botnets….

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

I seem to be getting the second flood of trackback spam attempts on the day. LOT’s of ip addresses, from all corners of the globe – most seem to be casino-related trackback spam. I guess botnets are being used for comment spam? It sure looks like a “100 pcs for an hour to do your […]

Nugache the latest in bot-net technology… and why you should care about botnets…

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

To show you where the threat with bot networks is going there’s a story today on Nugache (Symantec summary) which is a bot that takes advantage of a number of clever tricks to avoid having the whole bot net shut down, allow command and control on an encrypted channel and essentially have no “human readable […]

Google
 
Web www.averyjparker.com