Archive for July, 2006

Microsoft Issues advisory on Powerpoint flaw

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

Here’s the link to Microsoft’s advisory. The main workaround seems to be…. Don’t open or save powerpoint attachments that you receive from untrusted sources, OR that you receive unexpectedly from trusted sources…. So, the only real workaround is what SHOULD be common practice. Whether or not there is a vulnerability in the news you should […]

Google search for malware accessible to all…

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. Of course, this will be partly limited by Google’s indexing which recently has not been quite as thorough as before, but… all […]

Sysinternals/Wininternals acquired by Microsoft

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

Sysinternals.com is a GREAT source of free Windows utilities (rootkit detector, process list, list of files being used by a process, etc….) Today the news started to spread that they’ve been acquired by Microsoft. Am I the ONLY person that has had an urge to download their entire free utility library?    Send article as […]

IPtables magic, or… Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables

Sunday, July 16th, 2006

Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables. For starters, I’ve tested this on a test system that started out with NO iptables rules, and then moved on to an IPCop install (the vmware download from vmwarez.com…) I’ve detailed previously one dilemma that I had with regard to my own cable connection which made me question how […]

Linux Local kernel vulnerability

Friday, July 14th, 2006

SANS has a story on another local kernel vulnerability for linux. I’ve got to say that I typically haven’t looked as much at “local” vulnerabilities on this site as I have talked about remote vulnerabilities. Usually local vulnerabilities are flaws that allow a user that’s already logged into a system to escalate their user rights […]

Open Source NTFS driver for linux with Read and Write support

Friday, July 14th, 2006

Linux has full support for so many file systems. Fat32, which is the filesystem of the Win98 and ME systems has had full read-write support as long as I can remember, but NTFS has not. In fact, NTFS has had read-only support in the main open source driver, but NO write support. (Or at least […]

Firewall musings…

Friday, July 14th, 2006

Yesterday I had a bit of a realization. I had just been looking at a wireless router/firewall setup and was thinking about the firewalling rules (which seemed to be geared at the WIRELESS lan… i.e. blocking that activity on the Wireless segment.) You know, traditionally firewalls have had the attitude of defending the internal network […]

Powerpoint zero day

Friday, July 14th, 2006

This has been a rough quarter for Office vulnerabilities… there seems to be a pattern, Microsoft patch day, then…. zero-day exploit within a week for an Office component. First Word, then Excel and now this month our vulnerable app is Powerpoint. The Security Fix has some coverage and notes the pattern – the likely motivation […]

Another attempt at different hardware problems

Friday, July 14th, 2006

I mentioned some time ago a frustrating issue with the hardware on my desktop that I had finally solved. I got the new system Which was a 64-bit AMD Athlon on an Asus k8N4-E board and a pci-express nvidia based card (6200 TurboCache), 1 GB of memory… Things worked very nice for a while, rock […]

The Spam fight turns to blogs….

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

I’ve detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for WordPress can be found in the following posts (reverse chronological order): Update on comment spam storms, trackback spam countermeasures such as akismet and trackback validation, another […]

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