Computer Tips -Tech Info

Good news for Windows XP users (especially XP Home). Microsoft has extended the support period for XP Home and Pro. Originally, security patch related support was expected to end December 31st of this year. According to the article for XP Home… So for the consumer versions of Windows XP, mainstream support was going to end […]

Brian Krebs at the Security Fix has done an interesting study related to how long it takes Microsoft to release a security fix for a problem, starting from the time they are notified of the security vulnerability. For the most part, 134.5 days has been the window between notification and vulnerability patching for the last […]

Microsoft has issued two advisories related to patches coming out today. Both are remote code execution vulnerabilities, the first affects Outlook and Exchange server, the second is related to embedded Web fonts. The links above don’t yet seem active, but should go to the technet Security bulletins once Microsoft finishes publishing those.    Send article […]

This hopefully will be my last post on the whole WMF exploit stuff…. It’s prompted in part by a comment on one of the articles on Windows 98 and the vulnerability. I realized that I hadn’t really brought things to a full conclusion for the Windows 98 users. Of course, Microsoft has released an official […]

Strange AIM worm going around. It apparently includes an interesting combination of rootkits, a rootkit detector, spyware/adware, and a specialized bittorrent client. The machines can then be controlled through IRC. Source seems to be the Middle East… IM hackers then control a global botnet where their infections can be tested and payloads are pushed. Facetime […]

Sometimes machines stop working, or you install a new piece of hardware and just can’t boot again. That’s when you have to get back to some basics to troubleshoot what the problem is. Yesterday I saw a machine that wasn’t booting. It would display the splash screen and then power down. They had a new […]

This is one that I run into from time to time. Most laptops the last year or two (actually maybe a bit longer), have built in wireless networking. This is great and makes for easy access to wireless access points just about anywhere. In fact, most current operating systems (Windows XP included) usually do a […]

For the last week, I’ve seen various headlines referring to a report from US-CERT that indicated 2005 had 5,198 security flaws reported. Out of those 2,328 were reported for Linux/Unix, 812 for Windows and 2,058 affecting more than one operating system. Now, I’m seeing all sorts of headlines about how Windows is more secure than […]

Microsoft has released the patch for the WMF vulnerability that’s been all over the news early. It was released to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com ahead of the previously announced January 10th “patch Tuesday”. Congrats to Microsoft for getting this out the door early. That should go a long ways to blunting the attacks that are making use of […]

Well, antivirus vendors and IT security folks are waiting now for the expected activation of the sober.y worm searching for a new downloads and a new revision of the pest. kaspersky’s log indicates the expected activation time is 00:00 GMT January 6th, which means here in the EST zone that would be 7PM EST… Of […]