Major botnet building and the massive jump in spam

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

For a few months now (since the demise of bluefrog actually) I’ve noticed that the level of junk mail has gone up on my own mail server. Yes, I use spamassassin to filter and tag, but the volume of stuff that’s tagged has gone up (as well as the volume that slips through.) I’ve had […]

Microsoft vulnerability whack-a-mole continues…..

Thursday, September 28th, 2006

Translation – Microsoft patched one vulnerability another surfaces…. Incidents.org brings us the frustrating news…. If you remember the month of browser bugs series of exploits back in July, there was a denial of service there that appears to have code execution after all. Coincidence or not, it got publicly released after the out of cycle […]

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 […]

CA etrust antivirus false positive

Friday, September 1st, 2006

We’ve got an antivirus false positive to pass along… apparently, a signature update for CA eTrust Antivirus has flagged lsass.exe on Windows 2003 as an undesirable program. There have been updates to address the problem, but if you’re running CA eTrust on Windows 2003 Server you’ve probably already seen the effects. Sans reports some 2003 […]

Good sarc monitoring tip

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Sarc is still in their month of security tips per day and todays is another good one. Todays tip is about monitoring machines, particularly those that “defend” your network. (Mail antivirus scanners/ proxy fitlers/scanners/etc.) The core of the advice is to not just ping – that only tells you if the system exists and is […]

Hiding malware may evade antivirus

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Sans had an interesting malware analysis this morning about a blob that appeared to be ascii text (gibberish) that was retrieved by a piece of malware. It turns out that the ascii text was a cleverly encoded exe file (windows executable or program file.) It took several iterations of their analysis to uncover the actual […]

Clamav 0.88.4 and prior DoS

Monday, August 7th, 2006

According to incidents.org a denial of service vulnerability has been noted in all versions of clamav prior to 0.88.4 (inclusive). At incidents last report the download for 0.88.4 was back after disappearing for a while which seemed to indicate a fix, however. I wasn’t aware 0.88.4 had been released before today (?). It looks as […]

Another McAfee security product flaw

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

Sans has info on a security flaw affect several McAfee security products. It could allow remote code execution. The 2007 versions of the products are not affected and a patch is expected soon. For your information, here are the affected products: McAfee Internet Security Suite 2006, McAfee Wireless Home Network Security, McAfee Personal Firewall Plus, […]

The end for Windows 98 may be a boost to linux?

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

There are articles out about the demise of official Windows 98 and ME support would be a boost to linux uptake. Realistically, I suppose it may, but I personally am not holding my breath. Here’s why. 1) The people still running Windows 98/ME are likely doing so because that’s what came with their PC. There […]

Another wolf in sheeps clothing to watch for

Friday, June 9th, 2006

Wolves in sheeps clothing are the label I give to those rogue antispyware, or antivirus programs that bring pests instead of protect against them, or are otherwise questionable in their tactics. Titan Shield seems to be a new threat on the block in this area, I haven’t seen it first hand yet, but it looks […]

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