Computer Tips -Tech Info

One of the vectors that has been mentioned early on is the infection of a system through the WMF exploit even when the exploited file was downloaded through a dos command shell. At first this seemed absurd, but it appeared that Google Desktop search was indexing files dynamically and once the file was downloaded it indexed the file and triggered the vulnerability. There is word that Microsoft’s indexing service does likewise – although Microsoft has only said that they’re “looking into reports”. Incidents.org is saying that they think this may be the giant white elephant no one is talking about. I certainly would shudder to think if machines on a network are indexing a network share and manage to subvert every machine running an indexing share….

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There is news this morning of a new twist in the WMF vulnerability (it was only a matter of time.) There are reports of an instant messenger worm using the vulnerability to spread. Currently incidents.org is reporting that the worm is spreading through the MSN messenger IM network and contains a malformed WMF file called “xmas-2006 FUNNY.jpg” The original source of the warning is Kaspersky Labs viruslist.com

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The F-secure blog is reporting on a third party patch for the WMF exploit. I have not tested it, it seems to come from a knowledgable source though. As I’m writing this though, the thought strikes me that a really nasty trick would be a claimed fix that actually exploited the vulnerability. It pays to check up on the source of ANY third-party fix for Windows (or any other operating system or software suite…) Anyway, this seems to be a good source though. He’s the primary author of IDA Pro (Interactive Disassembler Pro).

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After the Hamachi article I wanted to do a series on OpenVPN. I’ve used it before, but not since the 1.x days…. it’s now at version 2.0.5 and has quite a bit more flexibility. When I first used it, it was pretty much a point-to-point vpn solution. You could set up routing to see the rest of the network and for the network to see the vpn client, but only one client could connect to one server. What this meant is that multiple tap or tun devices were needed on the server, one for each remote vpn client. Also, multiple openvpn processes and multiple openvpn ports.

From my understanding this setup wasn’t necessary under the 2.x series.

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So, I’ve spent a bit of time talking about flightgear. Here are a couple extra resources that I want to “bookmark” here. There is a Good unofficial how-to here. (Mostly linux flightgear oriented. Also, the flightgear scenery is available here. The link is to a grid covered world map. Clicking on a grid quadrant downloads scenery for that quadrant.

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Along the lines of “knowing your network” with the network security guide. Here are some of the most commonly used network ports. There are 65535 ports that can listen for a connection, so this is not a thorough listing. (These are tcp unless noted otherwise.)

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I don’t know if kcron deserves a seperate entry for scheduling tasks under linux. Cron is what I typed on last time and it’s the daemon that controls scheduled tasks. The method for scheduling tasks that I went through last time is for the command line. Like many things in linux, there are other ways to get the job done. In this case, one way through the graphical interface is kcron…

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So, when I did the laptop upgrade I formated the root partition which means that working mythtv frontend was erased and it had to be set up from scratch. I had been running version 0.16 of mythtv on all the systems, but finding rpms for that older version looked challenging, so…. I went ahead with the upgrade to 0.18.1 on the desktop first. All went fairly smoothly using Thac’s rpms of mythtv.

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This should probably go in the Windows tech support category too… but, as I’ve talked about before I’ve spent a good amount of time using different linux livecd’s. I’ve even made a few livecd’s of my own with Mandrake (now mandriva) linux, using the mklivecd scripts. One of the nice things about a livecd is that it’s self contained, portable and relatively secure (any compromise should be able ot be undone by rebooting.) There are linux livecds customized for just about every conceivable use. The ones I did varied from booting to an image slideshow to a full cooker based desktop.

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So, most everything so far has been targetted to high speed internet users or business networks. That means if I use dialup I’m safe. Wrong. For starters, in many ways dialup internet is LESS of a risk than high speed broadband for two main reasons. First, high speed/broadband connections are typically on ALL the time. Which raises your exposure. Like the security through obscurity concept though… just because dialup is only online a limited amount of time, that shouldn’t be the only reliance on protecting your system.

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