Archive: Windows Software

I came across an interesting one in the last few days. This system was a Windows XP system with current updates - SP3, IE 8.... and among other things there was a complaint of very sluggish behavior.…

Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had starte…

Good linux format review of the new features and the overall feel (if you can get to it this morning. The main openoffice.org site is down at the moment. New features include a plugin for pdf import,…

Internet Explorer 7 is going to be an automatic upgrade through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on February 12. This was announced last fall, but is now about to become reality. According to Mi…

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck... users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there's also a utility called TestDisk that looks p…

I've mentioned X-Plane before - it's a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it's also unique in that it's available for…

I've run into a few problems with a windows xp repair install in the last few days that I wanted to detail the problems and what the resolution was. First, it was someone elses laptop needing a hard …

I've had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it's HP specific, but don't know for certain.) The error goes like this... "A problem has been detected a…

I like the PDF file format for so many reasons - free writer under linux is one of them, usually it's just configured out of the box - openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is acce…

For years I've been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I've absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I've had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an …

and you can't turn it on without an error... Oh boy... last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It c…

You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista's upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions w…

There could be a record number of vulnerabilities addressed next week when Microsoft releases an expected dozen updates for its Windows and Office products. (According to Brian Krebs at the Security …

If you're upgrading to Vista and use an ipod (true Apple branded iPod)... you might want to refrain from hooking the ipod up to the Vista pc. theregister has reported that Apple is sounding the alarm…

Microsoft Vista is now out, the next version of Windows, successor to XP. While Windows XP will continue to receive updates into 2014 there are many that might be eager to upgrade and move to the lat…

Here's a followup to one of the first big stories that I posted on... the Sony rootkit - there has been a settlement with the FTC (Federal Trade Commision). It has yet to be approved but, affected cu…

Of course, you shouldn't be using Windows 98 anymore, it's unsupported (i.e. no security updates.) However the reality is that there are quite a few Win 98 installs out there perking away. But, with …

I want to make a note of this here... Microsoft has announced that XP Home and Media center editions will get extended support on par with that of XP Pro. Essentially this means security updates for …

In the past when installing an upgrade version of Windows it meant having your original disk handy to prove that you were REALLY eligible for an upgrade license. What this meant is that if you wanted…

Haven't had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I've been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions o…

I've done one or two mentions in the past of ways to recover/reset lost windows passwords and thought it was probably time for another "brain dump/web research dump" of things that I've run across. T…

Another issue was reported with the new IE 7 and confirmed by Microsoft. It seems that it's possible for a malicious link to spoof the information in the address bar (make it look like you're at a si…

Looks as though IE 7 release is imminent and will be in automatic updates on November 1st. Here's one persons take on the user interface "improvements". Now, there are many improvements in core funct…

Baring big problems, the final release candidate for the new 2.0 version of Mozilla Firefox is out reported here and here. Mozilla.com page for the RC is here.

The SecurityFix reminds us of what usually comes close behind Patch Tuesday.... exploit Wednesday or Thursday and this month, the exploits seemed to start coming out Thursday. There's a new Powerpoin…

I should say that George Ou has been trying to put to rest some of the concerns people have about "will xyz program run on vista". The All About Microsoft blogpost on virtual PC seems to have started…

Sunbelt reminds us that the daxctle.ocx exploit was NOT among those patched Tuesday by Microsoft. They remind us of the following workaround... Mitigation: The DirectAnimation Path control can be dis…

Intelliadmin published this earlier today... with all the problems some people have had with the Genuine advantage notification that their copy of Windows may not be legitimate (many reasons for this…

Internet Explorer 7 is set to be released this month (October 2006) and it will likely be an automatic update for Windows users either November or December of this year. (I'm thinking November.) Now,…

The first thing I should mention is that this months update from Microsoft is the last for XP SP1 users should plan a migration path to SP2 to keep getting updates to XP. Multiple vulnerabilities thi…

It's kind of interesting to get to do a "browser wars" kind of post where I mention a new release of two browsers coming out about the same time.... The release of IE7 is coming within weeks we are r…

11 patches will be released by Microsoft on the 10th of October. Bulletin is here, 6 for windows, 4 for Office (at least one in each of those two batches is critical) and 1 .NET (moderate) - yes the …

Wolves in sheeps clothing.... from Sunbelt blog.... Watch out for pestcapture and "friends" (using dlls from spysheriff). Thanks to sunbelt for keeping their eyes open on the threat of wolves in shee…

So, I was formatting a drive the other day. It's an external hard drive that will need to be readable AND writable by both Mac and Windows XP machines. So, the only choice (without paying for MacDriv…

For starters, if you're using Windows 98 or ME still in a production system, you REALLY need to be looking at migration options and you should realize that the architecture of those systems is NOT co…

I saw a comment somewhere else that zero-day was overused and in essense ANY previously unknown vulnerability in open source software is technically zero day... the intent here though is to use the w…

Sometimes you feel like the little Dutch boy of myth/legend with his finger trying to plug the hole in a dam.... Incidents bring us this as well.... another powerpoint vulnerability seems to have bee…

Translation - Microsoft patched one vulnerability another surfaces.... Incidents.org brings us the frustrating news.... If you remember the month of browser bugs series of exploits back in July, ther…

The big news this afternoon is that Microsoft HAS gone out of the routine patch cycle to release a security fix for the VML vulnerability that's been actively exploited in recent days for everything …

Just catching up on the days VML vulnerability news from today.... It looks as though... the exploit is now MUCH more widespread this blog has some video of an infection, what's notable is that the f…

Sunbelt is still finding fake codec sites.... This most recent site is mpcodec.com and the ip address of 69.50.160.58 (I had to do a doubletake as THIS site (averyjparker.com) is hosted at 69.36.180.…

The last zero day (activeX) seems to be less interesting than this NEW zero-day that really made a news splash in the last day. It looks as though this NEW 0-day affects VML... Incidents.org has good…

This time around, the zero day is related to Internet Explorer and activex... (directanimation specifically). Incidents has a good update on the issue. This is a second exploit, there was another at …

As I've just posted to the security-update-notice category, Firefox and Thunderbird both have been released in 1.5.0.7 version.... the release fixes a number of known security issues and you should u…

Yesterday, of course, Microsoft released it's monthly patches. I found the Windows update site to be painfully slow (and in some cases unresponsive.) It wasn't quite a huge update day by recent stand…

This is getting to be like clockwork, but it sounds like this may be one of the nastiest problems so far. It appears that there is a problem with one of the recent patches from Microsoft MS06-49. It …

Some time back I remember an article I had on vcodec not being a legitimate video codec. At the time there was some malware claiming to be vcodec and "required" to view some content.... well, posing …

Not too long ago I was installing a fax machine for someone that supported Outlook Express' addressbook, but not Outlook's default addressbook. My first thought was to get Outlook (2002)/Outlook Expr…

Sans brings this from AOL, advising of vulnerabilities in the ICQ client and the ICQ toolbar for IE. The latest version of ICQ client is 5.1 and is claimed to not be vulnerable. (Toolbar version 1.3 …

So, the stories are out of the analysis of the code for Mozilla Firefox. It seems there were a large number of potential flaws found (71 potential security vulnerabilities) according to the article. …

I didn't really think of this in context, but George Ou points out that Microsoft issued an "out of cycle" patch for their DRM software in response to the FairUse4WM software that stripped DRM protec…

Some time ago, I've talked about chntpasswd as a great utility for when you're locked out of a Windows 2000 or XP installation because you've either forgotten (or weren't informed) of the valid passw…

In the struggle between fairuse4wm and Microsoft DRM, it appears that fairuse4wm is out on top again. Just to sum up - the last few weeks saw a release of fairuse4wm that stripped DRM from Microsoft …

I ran into something I hadn't yet seen firsthand today. A PC (running Windows XP home) with 2 optical drives (CD-RW and DVD drive). However, neither cd drive showed up in My Computer and both of them…

Yesterday codeweavers announced a beta release of their Crossover Office product geared towards Apple Mac OS X users. The software will allow certain windows applications to run on top of Apple's ope…

A new Internet Explorer bug was published on Monday. It's been given a CVE (2006-4446) and affects IE 6.0 SP1. It's worth considering alternative browsers. Details from bugtraq indicate that it's a b…

We've got an antivirus false positive to pass along... apparently, a signature update for CA eTrust Antivirus has flagged lsass.exe on Windows 2003 as an undesirable program. There have been updates …

Mozilla is soliciting people to test the candidates for version 1.5.0.7 of both Firefox and Thunderbird, so that sounds as though release is VERY close for that version. It sounds as though there are…

I've FINALLY tracked down what was causing the issue with displaying my page in Internet Explorer 7 (RC1). It turns out that the stattraq plugin in wordpress (stattraq site) is part of the problem. N…

I've been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as "Internet explorer cannot display t…

So, in the last article I detailed a solution to getting a legacy application to run under a limited user account in XP. This legacy application wasn't working correctly without administrator privili…

Several months back I had to figure out a way to get Create a card gold (5.0?) run on an XP system. The only real problem was that I had setup the account with limited user privileges (shared machine…

The Java Runtime Environment from Sun has a vulnerability that's due in large part to a poor approach to updating it. IF you have not uninstalled previous versions of the JRE on your PC, they are lik…

This incidents.org article the other day caught my eye. It talked of a utility calledliveview that could take a hard drive (or image of a drive) and make it into a virtual machine for use in vmware (…

I had a frustrating morning last week. I had setup a new pc, transferred data and gotten everything in fairly nice shape. I had got the old printer attached and setup (HP Deskjet 5550). In fact I had…

A couple weeks back, there was a pretty important security update for the Intel Proset Wireless driver. The big problem is that the update was a memory hog and caused porblems. Sans has info on the u…

They're doing what they can at Microsoft to put to rest the notion that IE7 won't make drastic strides in CSS compliance. One of the fronts they're pushing is this detailed listing of CSS fixes that …

This has been one of the "problem child" patches this time around and it looks as though it's worse than initially thought. Apparently, instead of "just" crashing IE SP1 when viewing compressed http …

I'm having to make sure I put the date in the title of these posts now.... over the weekend there were rumors of a new powerpoint vulnerability. Sans had an early notice of some trojan droppers using…

Incidents.org has been running their security tip a day this month and I really liked this one. It's essentially a way to encrypt your wireless traffic using ssh. That's something I've covered here b…

Sans has updated their chart that illustrates Microsoft's August patches. They've updated it to give information about the problems that have been reported with now 2 of this months patches (MS06-040…

Or lack of currently available patch as the case may be. From the previous link it appears that there was at least one previously announced vulnerability that was not addressed in the recent patch da…

MS06-040 is one of last weeks Windows updates and is the one that was probably the biggest target for "wormable" activity. There's a good deal of news from over the weekend with regards to this. Firs…

The big computer security news of the day is the release of exploit code publicly for MS06-040. The patch of course was released Tuesday and it is fairly critical to get the update installed. This is…

Incidents.org has an initial list of the updates today from Microsoft, there is also a brief from Microsoft on the updates. It appears as though one is Powerpoint specific, another is Office releated…

HDR - recently I heard someone talking about this with regards to digital imaging. The idea is that you have three identical images (landscapes) taken from a stationary (tripod) camera. The only diff…

Backwards compatibility. It's something that many vendors strive for and Microsoft is certainly one that has placed a value on making things backwards compatible for third party software. According t…

Security Focus has a brief that refers to a WMF zero-day vulnerability that affects Windows XP SP2. I suspect this may get a bit of coverage throughout the day. It appears as though there are actuall…

Incidents.org has some reports of false positives reported by Grisoft's AVG antivirus running on Windows XP (SP1).... The false positive was with a file named C:\i386\REG.EXE which is a legit file fr…

August's advance bulletin of Microsoft updates is already up. Tuesday of course is the monthly Microsoft patch day. It appears as though there will be 12 updates this time around. As usual, it could …

Boy, that would bring in comments.... Googling Google highlighted some behaviour of the Google toolbar that seems a bit fishy. It appears that it blocks attempts to modify the default search provider…

Sans has a writeup on Windows local privilige escalation using the Windows scheduler and among other things it might be worth starting out by saying that typically, only Administrative group users in…

That was a quick turn around.... It appears as though some of the multimedia streaming issues were severe enough to require a quick turnaround for Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 Sans had the initial heads u…

Sometimes you run across a site that's a browser snob. You know the type.... you visit it in Mozilla Firefox or (anything other than IE) and it says, "you must use Internet Explorer version 6 or newe…

Again.... this article referring to an exploit related to the cross platform plugin capability in firefox, is a GOOD reminder to be cautious when looking at potential plugins to install for mozilla f…

Sans has info on a security flaw affect several McAfee security products. It could allow remote code execution. The 2007 versions of the products are not affected and a patch is expected soon. For yo…

Well, let's start with the extensions first. Like ANY software, you should be cautious installing something from an untrusted source. If you think an extension looks neat and cool - look for reviews …

The news has come that Internet Explorer 7 will come out as a high priority security update when it's released later this year. This should mean good things for the folks that are still using IE6 as …

We're planning a quick trip out of town and I'm using the lowly free version of Google Earth that doesn't integrate with a GPS device. So, I had got a series of places tagged in "My Places" and had s…

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 t…

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 acquir…

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 a…

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…

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…

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…

There are articles out about the demise of official Windows 98 and ME support would be a boost to linux uptake. Realistically, I suppose it may, but I personally am not holding my breath. Here's why.…

and Internet Explorer use has dropped below 80% in the US. Currently 12.93% of online users browse with Firefox. Almost 40% of German web-browsers use Firefox to view the web. It's nice to see Firefo…

I really couldn't find a quick answer to this on this in a quick search. Maybe it's just me. But, one of the computers that I support has UPS Worldship installed on it. (Version 8.0.16 I think.) They…

One of the frustrating things about windows is having to wander through X number of menus looking for a specific item that you KNOW is there, but just can't quite find. If ONLY you remembered the com…

Sunbeltblog has the heads up on this one. Spyheal is the name it goes by and it hangs out at spyheal (dot) com So, if you're in a position to block sites that looks like one to filter for your networ…