Computer Tips -Tech Info

Sunbelt is still finding fake codec sites…. This most recent site is mpcodec.com and the ip address of 69.50.160.58 (I had to do a doubletake as THIS site (averyjparker.com) is hosted at 69.36.180.58 – I usually see the first and last numbers first and thought – “wait a minute – that looks familiar…” the middle […]

The last zero day (activeX) seems to be less interesting than this NEW zero-day that really made a news splash in the last day. It looks as though this NEW 0-day affects VML… Incidents.org has good coverage here. Microsoft has an advisory up and they expect to release a patch on the next scheduled patch […]

This time around, the zero day is related to Internet Explorer and activex… (directanimation specifically). Incidents has a good update on the issue. This is a second exploit, there was another at the end of August, MS has an advisory on the issue. I think a safe bet would be alternative browsers until this is […]

Yesterday, of course, Microsoft released it’s monthly patches. I found the Windows update site to be painfully slow (and in some cases unresponsive.) It wasn’t quite a huge update day by recent standards, but here’s the summary…. Incidents.org has a nice chart showing the two re-released patches (one is actually re-re-released…) They are MS06-040 (server […]

This is getting to be like clockwork, but it sounds like this may be one of the nastiest problems so far. It appears that there is a problem with one of the recent patches from Microsoft MS06-49. It looks as though the problem is data corruption for small files (under 4096 bytes.) There’s a google […]

Some time back I remember an article I had on vcodec not being a legitimate video codec. At the time there was some malware claiming to be vcodec and “required” to view some content…. well, posing as a codec download is a good way to trick people into downloading it seems and there are more […]

Not too long ago I was installing a fax machine for someone that supported Outlook Express’ addressbook, but not Outlook’s default addressbook. My first thought was to get Outlook (2002)/Outlook Express using the same contact format and then we’d be in business… But…, they had an exchange server so, Outlook was installed in Corporate/Workgroup mode, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]