According to Information Week, there’s a new IM worm out hitting the MSN, ICQ, Yahoo and AIM networks. It poses as a come on for a Santa Claus site. On visiting the site, users receive an unexpected “present” a rootkit which is hidden.
I haven’t used yahoo search too much in quite a while, but there is an interesting post in their search blog about Yahoo Shortcuts. An example is typing in !ebay lamps takes you to ebay.com and searches for lamps. (Part of me is asking, why not just go to ebay and search for lamps??? – but there are some interesting uses for this within a toolbar – I can imagine it would get you there a step or two more quickly.)
You can tell we’re in the last 10-12 days of the year when we start seeing all sorts of year end retrospectives, year’s in review, countdowns of the top ___ of ___year ending___. Well, spyware has seen a banner year in many respects and Suzi at Spyware Confidential has a rundown of the top 10 tricks used in 2005.
Sunbelt Software has announced the completion of their acquisition of the Kerio Personal Firewall. They’ve also acquired the Kerio Server Firewall. The products have temporarily been rebranded…
We have acquired both the Kerio Personal Firewall and the Kerio Server Firewall. Both products will be re-branded on an interim basis as the “Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall” and “Sunbelt Kerio ServerFirewall”.
The first maintenance release for Openoffice.org 2 has been released sometime today according to Betanews.com. It’s mainly a bugfix release. I didn’t see an official announcement on their main site, but there is a link to some of the details that have been fixed. (The link is for one of the release candidates.)
Google has released their Zeitgeist 2005. Zeitgeist is German and would translate roughly as “spirit of the times”. The idea is to give a snapshot of what people are thinking about and searching for over the course of the last year.
They’ve done some interesting graphs as well of search terms when events happen.
According to this securityfix post it’s a daily occurance. The email that he cites was from a woman who was informed by a company that a data backup had been “lost track of”. There is a web site that chronicles such data security breaches. privacyrights.org. It’s certainly worth a look.
A few things to catch up on this afternoon, but first up is a Serious vulnerability in Symantec Antivirus. (It’s always serious when security software has a vulnerability.) The securityfix is reporting that a vulnerability has been discovered in the way Symantec deals with rar archived files. A specially made rar archive could make a hidden virus or worm in the archive run. It could be exploited remotely, in other words, as Symantec scans the file/attachments in email, the specially crafted rar file could make Symantec run the enclosed bug.
One of the things about running KDE in linux is it can be a big resource grabber and be slow starting. By contrast “light” window managers can be up and running in a relative flash (xfce). OSnews has a story on SUSE/Novell KDe developers that have managed to get down to 4-5 second start time for KDE (which is fairly impressive.) Here are a few of their blog entries on the matter.
I’m sure you remember the CIA/FBI virus a few weeks back. There was a German version of this and apparently one individual took the warning email to heart and turned himself in for child pornography. Found this at Sunbeltblog and f-secure.
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