TechBlog

The H-Security: Microsoft has released two updates for Windows and three for Office to close various security holes. All five updates have only been rated “important” by the company. A hole in WINS enables local attackers to escalate their privileges on a system. Another patch prevents a new variant of binary planting, or DLL hijacking, attacks that can cause Windows to load DLLs from shared network volumes without the user’s permission. This allows attackers to execute code on a computer via specially crafted DLLs. Microsoft has been struggling to contain the insecure DLL loading problem with numerous patches released since mid 2010. ...

SophosLabs: Following the widely-publicised disgrace of Dutch digital certificate issuer DigiNotar, a person calling himself ComodoHacker claimed that he’d breached four other Certificate Authorities (CAs), too. Only one of these CAs was named: GlobalSign, the world’s fifth-biggest issuer of digital certificates. In my opinion, GlobalSign would have been justified in ignoring this claim altogether. It comes across as a stream of made-up, self-serving puffery, including bluster like this: You see? I’m so smart, sharp, dangerous, powerful, etc. huh? ...

Business Insider: A new poll in France says 7 out of 10 people think Microsoft did more to change the world than Apple. We think we would have similar results in other countries, if only because a lot more people (still!) use Microsoft products than Apple products, at least for personal computing which is (still!) the most important part of computing. It’s hard to see a mention of Steve Jobs without the worlds “change the world” or “changing an industry.” And let’s give him his due. Let’s give him his due as one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history, as an amazing entrepreneur and visionary who left many “dents” in the universe. And he did change many industries, like music, film, and yes, personal computing. ...

SophosLabs: Pop singer Pink has posted an angry message to hackers, who she claims stole photographs from her Facebook page. But was Pink’s Facebook page really hacked, or was she just one of the many people who have been careless with their privacy settings? The Grammy award-winning singer, famous for hit records such as “Get the party started” and “God is a DJ”, posted on Twitter about the incident, but didn’t clarify the nature of the photos the hackers might have accessed. ...

TheHackerNews.com: The hacker warns the Internet community that he has access to 4 other high-profile CAs, among them being GlobalSign, a certification authority from the U.S. He threatens that he will use his power over the companies to issue false certificates, which will later become the weapon of his revenge against countries who deserve it.In his own words, he said “I won’t talk so many detail for now, just I wanted to let the world know that ANYTHING you do will have consequences, ANYTHING your country did in past, you have to pay for it…”. Complete Message here. ...

rockpapershotgun.com: Are you a German teenager? Then do we have some good news for you! After a short seventeen year-long wait, you are now legally allowed to buy a copy of Doom. And, indeed, Doom can now be stocked in normal shops, not just ones ominously deemed ‘adults-only’ – which was basically putting the game right up there with porn. As of yesterday, Germany’s Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (Bundesprufstelle) has removed Doom – and Doom II – from its list of ‘controlled’ games, following an appeal by id’s owners Bethesda. Their reasoning? Because the Bundesprufstelle thinks Doom is ‘now only of artistic and scientific interest and will not appeal to youngsters’, according to the BBC. ...

Google Chrome Blog: It’s that time of the year again for the Chrome team, when we pause on our anniversary to reflect on the amazing life and times of the web. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been three years since we launched our open source web browser, Chrome. In that time, the web community has continued to inspire us, bringing the power of the web into all kinds of apps and experiences, with all modern browsers making great strides in speed, simplicity and security. To pay homage to the goodness of the web, we’ve put together an interactive infographic, built in HTML5, which details the evolution of major web technologies and browsers: ...

TechSpot: Wikileaks found itself the victim of a cyberattack on Tuesday, shortly after the release of thousands of US State Department communications. News broke of the attack on their Twitter page, which offered another link to the communications, and a message stating “WikiLeaks.org is presently under attack.” It is likely that they were hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the most commonly used method by hackers to cause disruption to websites. It works by flooding the servers with traffic, overloading them, and subsequently causing the servers to crash, or become otherwise unreachable. ...

SophosLabs: Even if it hasn’t been officially announced yet, and certainly isn’t available to the general public (unless an Apple employee loses a test model in a bar), there are plenty of scammers out there trying to trick you into believing you can get a free iPhone 5. Here’s just a sample of the pages on Facebook claiming to be an iPhone 5 giveaway. Typically they are trying to trick you into clicking on links, driving traffic to online surveys which earns them revenue. ...

TechSpot: Facebook plans to launch a music service on September 22, which happens to coincide with the company’s F8 conference. The news comes via CNBC’s twitter feed which reported the headline earlier today. A quick blurb on CNBC’s website also mentions the pending music service launch, suggesting that Facebook won’t actually host the music, but will partner with a provider to offer the service. There isn’t much more to go on at the moment, but this isn’t the first time we’ve heard such rumors. Last month, Facebook announced a video calling feature powered by Skype. Software developer Jeff Ross panned through the program’s code and found references to an app called Facebook Vibes which connects with a music download dialog. Ross posted the following statement on his blog. ...