Computer Tips -Tech Info

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  • Google Sitemaps adds more tools

    I just re-visited sitemaps last night to take a look at some of the new tools they’ve rolled out. Google announced that they were adding a few features in the last couple days. Crawl statistics (and control over slow/normal/fast crawl speed) is one of the additions, also it’s possible to tag images for better searching and the number of URL’s read from a sitemap. Nice, I’d LOVE to see them add the pagerank (in google toolbar form) on the page that they show the report of the page with the highest pagerank for the month. By the way, the faster crawl rate is not available for all sites, only if google determines that crawl rate MAY be a factor in getting your pages indexed. The change to faster lasts for 3 months. (Faster crawl rate could put a higher load on your server.) I found that sites with less than 20 pages (give or take) didn’t have the faster crawl option, bigger sites (20+) did have the option. (Rough estimate.)

  • CLI Magic with curl

    I saw this great article from enterprise.linux.com giving some good ideas on some of the interesting things that can be done with curl. (Curl is a command line application for accessing URL’s (web/ftp/etc.))

  • Phantastic site for Phishing research….

    By way of Sunbelt blog… The Phishtank at Internet Defence has a realtime archive of phishing emails as well as real time information on the status of their host sites. On their phishing site monitor it says…

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  • More discussion on the Firefox 1.5.0.3 “image bug”

    There’s quite a bit more discussion on a DOS bug in Firefox 1.5.0.3, the link goes to a site where they’ve confirmed the issue and there is a link there to a POC, so be cautious. It turns out that using javascript, image tags can be made to have a mailto: link which can automatically launch tons of instances of whatever default mailhandler a system has (essentially one for each image tag.) Right now, this sounds more like a Denial of Service risk, as I don’t see at this point any evidence that anything WORSE could be done than really freezing up the system with too many copies of the mail program open.

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  • Another Sober.y reminder

    f-secure.com has another warning for us about the pending awakening of the sober worm. From reports it’s expected to start looking for sites to download from January 5th into January 6th. There is an extensive list of URL’s to block. This from f-secure.com – if you’re in charge of block lists at a network, this could be a good start to make sure you don’t have any clients pulling a new version from the following sites…

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  • Disinfecting a PC… part 6

    Ok, it’s BHOdemon time… installed from cd and on starting:

    BHOdemon bhotb-all.html not found, no web connection downloading on other machine.

    Finally get it to work copying from another machine. But I had to change the Windows ME to show full filenames to help troubleshoot why it couldn’t find the file (naming problem.) (There seems to be a strange display problem on setting “don’t hide file extensions” menu, (I can’t see the check boxes or the checkmarks…. I managed to toggle them “blind” to show file extensions)…

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  • More details on Sober worm

    There’s a bit more detail in this betanews article on the sober worm. They basically say that the next expected “release” is January 8th, that f-secure has cracked the “code” of the worm. You see it appears that the URL’s that new versions of the worm are downloaded from are not hardcoded, but “psuedorandom” and they’ve cracked the algorithm the worm uses.

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  • More on Firefox 1.5 “vulnerability”

    I put vulnerability in quotes because it’s looking less like a problem. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) Here’s the situation. Both Sans and Mozilla have failed to duplicate the crash although have duplicated extremely slow browser performance. Here’s the official response from mozilla.org…

    We have investigated this issue and can find no basis for claims that variants of this denial-of-service attack can cause an exploitable crash, and no evidence for this claim has been offered. There does not appear to be any risk to users or their computers beyond the temporary unresponsiveness at startup.

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  • Firefox 1.5 vulnerability

    Incidents.org has reported on the first announced vulnerability with Mozilla Firefox 1.5 since it’s release. The vulnerability is along these lines. History of visited sites is kept in a file called history.dat IF a URL for a visited site is long enough it will cause a buffer overflow and denial of service. (After visiting such a url, the browser will crash on each attempted start. (until history.dat is deleted.))

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  • Beware emails that sound too good to be true

    A new phishing scheme is promising tax refunds in the amoutn of over $500 to recipients of the scam. Sophos has an advisory. It looks pretty devious – asking people to type in the link address (or copy and paste) and using URL redirect to make it use an official site to then redirect to the phony site.

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