There is ANOTHER IE vulnerability that’s come across the news in the last week. It seems that this is currently only a Proof of Concept, I’ll have to check and see if anyone’s reported seeing this in the wild…, but essentially a race condition between a Macromedia flash file and web content can allow a forged address bar location… in other words it might say www.google.com in the address bar, but you’re actually looking at www.evilhackerplayground.org….
I’ve made mention I think that I use the stattraq plugin for wordpress as one of the ways to see where traffic is coming from on the site, etc. etc. etc. I think I mentioned it as one of my stat tracking tools about the time Google Analytics limped out of the gate… Anyway.. one of the things that had bugged me about it for some time was that it was SOOOOO slow to pull up any information (maybe a minute to pull in the page?) I had noticed a performance tip from the author…
The multi-OS virus may be a proof of concept, but it could be a sign of bad things to come. Let’s face it, there have been viruses that have taken advantage of multiple ways of spreading (email/open network shares/instant messengers…) It would almost make sense that even though it’s POC…. it may be quickly incorporated into future virus strategies….
For around 3-4 months now I’ve had a REALLY annoying problem with the wordpress install on this site. Trackbacks suddenly stopped working. Somewhere around my 800th post or so while the WMF vulnerability was circulating (between Christmas and New Years) and I was typing furiously – poof…. suddenly trackbacks stopped going out. (Incoming trackbacks seemed to work just fine…) What’s had me stumped for so long is that I host 2 (now three) other sites off the same domain and I haven’t had a problem with ANY of those sending pingbacks or trackbacks.
So, I spent the better part of the evening doing WordPress updates to get 5 blogs up to v. 2.0.2 and now….. clamav has multiple vulnerabilities …………… oi…. now it’s time to rebuild clamav to install on 2 machines……
I had undertaken an update earlier this evening to a “sister site” here…. the onlineradiotv.com site had started out as a wordpress 2.0 site and I thought it would likely be the easiest to upgrade to 2.0.2 which is a security upgrade and therefore high priority, but I’m just now getting to it. I know why I’ve put it off though… I’ve spent the last 2-3 hours struggling with an issue after the upgrade process finished that gave me a message like this “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” on logging in.
To change the Google theme of the afternoon…. Microsoft is due to release their April updates this coming Tuesday (April 11th.) Advance bulletin is here. Four updates affecting Windows, one affecting Office AND Windows. Highest severity is Critical (Explorer flaw probably) Reboot will be required… The Office/Windows update MAY require a reboot and is listed as Moderate.
I remember a time when I enjoyed April Fools – when I was real little I’d try the outlandish “there’s a tiger in the front yard” kind of stuff, later, perhaps more subtle…. but I’ve NEVER been a fan of the idea of a news reporting organization putting out an april fools story. Every day we have to gaurd ourselves to take every email that comes in with a grain of salt, watching for signs of phishing attack or social engineering. It really bugs me though when supposedly trustworthy sources burn some credibility on April fools day…
I’ve noticed that the information in Google Sitemaps continues to improve. For instance in the list of search terms and the average top position which is something that previously was quite tedious to figure out (search and then click until you find your page referenced…) It also gives content analysis of your site, and analysis of incoming links to your site (what words are there.) The average search term rank though is probably the most valuable addition I see. They’ve also….
I’m greatly delayed in writing about this, but Google underwent a huge search engine change. I want to say the switch over occured around February 1st or second. I had been seeing 1000 or so visits a day prior to the change (well to be fair 600-1200 a day…) and after the change now see 60-120 visits a day. Yes, the change was that big. eweek tells us some about it. All in all many say that this is improving search results. (I suspect I’d think so as well if my pages were MORE prominent after the update…)
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