Archive for the 'Computers' Category


Being cautious with web links

Friday, September 8th, 2006

Once upon a time the bad payload of a malicious email was it’s attachment, that still happens, but in many cases the links are the real lure – like a worm dangled in the water in front of a hungry fish…. the links though hide a danger on the other side…. the hook in our […]

ICQ client and toolbar vulnerabilities

Friday, September 8th, 2006

Sans brings this from AOL, advising of vulnerabilities in the ICQ client and the ICQ toolbar for IE. The latest version of ICQ client is 5.1 and is claimed to not be vulnerable. (Toolbar version 1.3 is said to be vulnerable as well. No more recent version of that is available – you might consider […]

Another Debian server security breach

Friday, September 8th, 2006

According to this story, there has been another compromise of a debian project server. (Is this the third in the last year?)… the Alioth webserver was offline most of the 5th of September… It was simply stopped because we discovered that some script kiddies were running an IRC proxy. After thorough investigation, we discovered that […]

Firefox code under the microscope

Friday, September 8th, 2006

So, the stories are out of the analysis of the code for Mozilla Firefox. It seems there were a large number of potential flaws found (71 potential security vulnerabilities) according to the article. This was done using an automated tool and many say, that in order to evaluate the true severity of the flaws, you […]

Microsoft’s priorities…

Friday, September 8th, 2006

I didn’t really think of this in context, but George Ou points out that Microsoft issued an “out of cycle” patch for their DRM software in response to the FairUse4WM software that stripped DRM protections from Windows Media Files. It took a mere 3 days from being made aware of the issue to releasing a […]

Google puts historical articles online, searchable

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006

Wow, this is nice – and frankly, something I could probably spend hours with. Search Engine Watch tells us that Google will debut a searchable news archive that takes us back through around 200 years worth of news stories. Yes, folks, google is putting the last 200 years of history online. I remember the newsgroups […]

Windows XP lost administrators password

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

Some time ago, I’ve talked about chntpasswd as a great utility for when you’re locked out of a Windows 2000 or XP installation because you’ve either forgotten (or weren’t informed) of the valid password to get in. It turns out there is a different approach… well yes, you could format and install from scratch blowing […]

The ways data is stolen..

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

Brian Krebs highlights a study on data theft/breaches. There are some interesting results (just 1/3 of data breaches were from criminal hacking, 29% from stolen laptops or storage media, 23% from improper disclosure of information (oops I published all our customers information on the website.) and 7% from inside sources – employees taking/selling data, just […]

Upgrading laptop wireless

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

George Ou had a good article on upgrading a laptops wireless to a multiband adapter. It looks like a fairly straightforward process. Personally, I’ve not risked much with regards to laptop repairs. (Keyboard replacement, battery replacement, hard drive replacement and memory have been the typical laptop repairs I’ve done – throw in optical or floppy […]

System patching 0-days and ancient-day vulnerabilities

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

There’s a good article at Michael Sutton’s Blog which points out something that really makes sense and I think many people are aware of, but with all the buzz that a new previously undisclosed vulnerability has, we forget. The point is this, there are plenty of machines online vulnerable to ancient flaws that have been […]

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