Apr 29 2009
The online pond scum are at it again, using public concern about the recent Swine Flu outbreak to trick people into opening infected email attachments or into visiting malicious web sites. No doubt they will be attempting to game search engine results, too, although this will be a lot tougher to accomplish than it was [...]
Apr 29 2009
Office 2007 Service Pack 2 was released yesterday. It’s a big download — 290MB if you grab the whole thing — but worth it. For most folks, the biggest reason to get it is that a number of Office applications load and run noticeably faster. SP2 also rolls up a great many security and bug [...]
Apr 28 2009
Here we go again.
Security researchers have turned up a couple more vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader (and Adobe Acrobat for those of you running the full, pay-for package). These flaws permit running arbitrary code on a target system without the user’s knowledge. This is triggered by tricking a victim into opening a maliciously crafted, JavaScript-enabled PDF [...]
Apr 13 2009
Chances are you won’t encounter it, but there is an annoying Twitter-based worm making the rounds. It’s a spam-generating prank created by an ethics-challenged 17-year-old “out of boredom.” There’s an article in PC World giving a decent overview and links to more information.
The Twitter folks seem to be doing a decent job of stomping the [...]
Apr 10 2009
April 14th is “Patch Tuesday.” Barring a major panic, Microsoft issues security updates for its products on the second Tuesday of the month. This month, we’re looking at eight patches, five of them rated “critical.” Microsoft’s offical security bulletin has all the details they’re willing to share so far.
It’s generally a good idea not to [...]
Apr 09 2009
As mentioned in the previous post, Conficker is stirring. After applying some code updates, it has started serving up malware. It’s typical of botnets like Conficker to be rented out in sections to various groups of dirtbags, so not all Conficker victims are getting identical infestations.
Some systems are being infected with a fake antivirus application [...]
Apr 09 2009
The now-infamous Conficker botnet has been showing some signs of activity over the last couple of days. It appears that it is trying to update itself to a different command and control technique, possibly in response to all the unwelcome attention it has been receiving from security researchers over the past few months. Some of [...]
Apr 09 2009
An overwrought piece by the Wall Street Journal about spies penetrating the U.S. electricity grid generated a great deal of coverage in the press over the last day or so. Given the noise level, I expected a multi-page, tell-all analysis. Instead, when I actually read the story, it turned out to be a fairly brief [...]
Apr 08 2009
Adobe recently released updates to Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat to fix a flaw that permitted running arbitrary code on a target system without the user’s knowledge. This is triggered by tricking a victim into opening a maliciously crafted PDF document — typically, an email attachment or a document served up on an infected web [...]
Apr 05 2009
“WhertRA,” the companion web log to “NVDi News & Alerts,” is now available. Rather than the shorter, time-sensitive items covered here, WhertRA will concentrate on general material about day-to-day computing tasks. Mostly, these articles will be written in response to customer questions and problems.
Why the funny name? Well, it all started with a dumb joke. [...]