Sans also brings this story about the Debian development server being compromised. Investigation is ongoing. The machine was gluck.debian.org and hosted CVS among other things (ddtp, lintian, people, popcon, planet, ports, release). It has been taken offline currently for a reinstall, other systems have been locked down until they can patch the vulnerability that they suspect was exploited. More details will be announced.
Month: July 2006
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Anonymized Botnet?
Sans has a story on botnet traffic spotted coming from the TOR network. Now, I had to refresh my memory on what TOR is, but it’s an anonymizing network, essentially a computer running TOR, would collect a list of TOR client machines on the internet and then connections to other pcs are routed through encrypted connections through several different pcs, which masks the origination of the data request. Of course, this doesn’t mean that botnets are actively making use of TOR, it could just be an inadvertant…. “route all my traffic through TOR” computer got a bug….
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VMWare server 1.0 final release
I’ve been keeping an install of Vmware virtual Server through their beta and Release Candidate phase and have seen several places that they’ve released the 1.0 version today. This release is free (as in no charge.) Although support is available….
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Adobe Acrobat reader update
On the heels of yesterdays massive update day from Microsoft, Adobe has released an update for the free Adobe Reader. The Adobe reader is one of those ALMOST essential applications that MOST everyone has installed. So, this will be of particular interest to MOST computer users. A SERIOUS security flaw (They’re tagging it CRITICAL) could be exploited with a specially crafted PDF file in version 6.0.4 (or earlier – back to 6) of the Reader for Mac or Windows.
Version 6.0.5 has been released to address this. It should be noted that the current newest version available is 7.0.8….
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Google Maps upgrade
I’ve seen a couple places referring to some improvements in the way google maps handles zooming and so I decided to take a look in Firefox. The zoom handling of Google maps is the one thing that I’ve wished for an improvement in for some time. After noticing MSN’s virtual earth had the capability of scroll wheel zooming, I really wanted it in Google Maps.
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Converting MPG video to dv files
I don’t know much about the dv format, except that it is a standard format that many camcorders use. For this reason, many video editors (such as kino for linux) prefer to see files coming in dv format. The problem I ran into is that the new handycam dvd puts images in .VOB files (which are really MPG). So, I found this handy script… that runs on Mac or Linux and is called mpeg2dv. It does the trick and is public domain. The only requirement I can see is ffmpeg.
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Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405
Well, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405 that I ordered from Amazon has arrived today (ordered the 5th of July, arrived the 11th with the “slow boat” free shipping option.) I’ve had it long enough to charge batteries, set time and do a few still pictures and a few short video clips. So, these will be my initial impressions, and I’ll likely follow up later with further thoughts/experience/etc. This was certainly not a small purchase for us and I spent quite a bit of time narrowing down choices. I really wanted a dvd based recorder. The idea of having it already in a format that we could archive was a real plus there. Yes, I might pull it onto the computer for editing, but life will be much simpler if I don’t HAVE to….
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Microsoft updates are out for July
and they affect no fewer than 18 issues in Office and Windows. 13 issues are tagged as critical, others as important. They are all bundled into 7 update downloads. 8 vulnerabilities within Excel have been addressed in all of this. Office 2000 users will have to manually update (Office XP/2003 updates can be brought in through Microsoft Update.) It looks like the flaw I found most interesting was a remote code execution vulnerability in the DHCP client… .(Affects 2000/xp and 2003).
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Product Reviews
From time to time I’ve done product reviews on this site and I’m getting ready to do a first impression review on something else. I’d like to take a step back though and give you my thoughts on product reviews in general and their value (or lack thereoff…) I usually take product reviews in a magazine with a grain of salt for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is who pays their advertising bills, maybe the editorial board of a publication is fond of a certain product for financial reasons…. also, they usually get the sample for free, so there’s a disconnect in the VALUE assessment of a product…
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Phisher’s getting sneakier
The SecurityFix reports on this clever two-factor authentication phishing attempt. They were looking for Citibank Business customers and in addition to username password information they were looking to verify a supplied token. The bottom line is that phishers will look to find any way possible to social engineer you out of your information credentials, whether they’re one-factor, two-factor or three factor, etc….. It appears as though it was a well done phish with a few exceptions and that it even checked some credentials by the citicard site giving an error message if you entered invalid login info.