Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: time

  • Microsoft Support extensions for XP

    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 on December 31, 2006 and there was no guarantee of any security hot-fixes beyond that time. Microsoft has now extended the mainstream support deadline for the consumer versions to an undefined date that is two years after the release of the follow-on operating system.

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  • Microsoft’s speed to get security patches out

    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 2 years from Microsoft. (That is for vulnerabilities that were submitted to Microsoft through the normal process…)

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  • January Patch Tuesday

    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.

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  • Windows 98 WMF patch

    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 patch for Windows 2000 and XP and 2003, the sky is no longer falling quite as quickly and all is well right? Well, not exactly for pre-2000 Windows users. They’ve just been told, they have a vulnerability, it’s not as critical as it is for XP/2000/2003 and if it were critical – “oh we’d fix it there too”, but it’s not, better luck next time (and who knows the same vulnerability could come around more critical for earlier Windows versions next time…) Anyway, there IS a patch for Windows 98 systems.

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  • AIM worm

    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 traced these hackers to the Middle East.
    The same IM hackers sent movies by way of IRC and their own version of BitTorrent, installing it without consent. Now the IM hackers are back with more, nastier malware, Rootkit Revealer and adware from 180solutions/Zango.

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  • Basic Hardware troubleshooting

    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 video card on a previous diagnosis using the indicator lights on the back (Dell). The add on card seemed to work, but the system was just not booting. Someone had suggested to them that it was a power problem.

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  • How to use wireless networking on a laptop

    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 great job of detecting available networks. (Sometimes they do too good a job which is why wireless security is an issue, but we’ll save that for a future post.) I’ve run into several laptops over the last few years though that supposedly had wireless networking, but the user hadn’t been able to access any wireless networks with the laptop. Usually it’s an easy fix….

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  • Windows more secure than Linux?

    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 Linux based on this report. (?!?) Did anyone reporting “windows more secure than linux/unix” actually read the report, look at some of the details and compare with the Technical Cyber Security Alerts?

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  • Microsoft releases patch early for WMF exploit

    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 this vulnerability.

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  • Sober virus watch…

    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 course many of the expected sites have been shut down. It appears that the virus will look periodically for sites to “upgrade” from for some time.

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