TechBlog

The Register: Microsoft plans to publish nine updates next Tuesday – four of which are critical – as part of a Valentine’s Day edition of its Patch Tuesday update cycle. Highlights of the batch, which collectively address 21 vulnerabilities, include a critical update for Internet Explorer. There are also two critical fixes for Windows itself, plus one for Microsoft’s .NET framework. Three the five remaining “important” fixes grapple with remote code execution-type vulnerabilities, one of which involves Office. Flaws of this type are best addressed sooner rather than later because they might easily be exploited by malware slingers. ...

The Inquirer: A Hacker using the pseudonyms ‘Weedgrower’ or ‘X-pOSed’ claims that he has compromised Intel and obtained sensitive data. The solo hacker claims to have found a flaw in the subscriber segment of Intel’s web site, according to The Hacker News. He said that he has access to sensitive data that includes credit card numbers, email addresses and passwords. Weedgrower said, “I’ve got to give some applause to all these pseudo-security technicians out there. I cut Intel a break, I have access to a database and another vulnerability which enables the right to read user data. I’ll be gracious here and NOT spill the data, but I will provide screenshots to prove that I have access to Credit Card data and such.” ...

LifeHacker: Windows has a ton of great utilities, and while we can’t live without some of them, there’s a special place in our heart for programs that merely improve Windows, rather than adding new software. Here are our top 10 apps that take Windows’ built-in tools and make them better. Continue reading it here: http://lifehacker.com/5884261/top-10-downloads-that-enhance-windows-built+in-tools

SophosLabs: The CIA’s website was brought down for some hours last night by what appears to have been an internet distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. A post made from an Anonymous-affiliated Twitter account announced that the site was doing using the phrase “CIA Tango Down”, although a later tweet left ambiguity as to whether the hacktivists were claiming responsibility for the attack. Of course, this is one of the challenges when trying to get a sense of what actions can be attributed to Anonymous or not. ...

SophosLabs: One of the largest ISPs in The Netherlands has shut down its email services after hackers posted usernames, passwords, phone numbers, addresses and more of more than 500 customers on the internet. KPN discovered the attackers on its network January 27th, but decided not to disclose the information immediately after consulting with the Dutch government and law enforcement agencies. Presumably this was intended to allow them to monitor the attacker and gather evidence that might be used to apprehend and prosecute them. ...

Symantec Connect: Recently there have been several reports about the re-emergence of a botnet variant (Kelihos), which Symantec detects as W32.Waledac.C. The Waledac family is a threat that has been monitored by Symantec for many years and was featured in numerous blogs as well as a white paper. In the past, Waledac gained its infamy as a spamming botnet that utilized compromised systems to send out spam. The purpose of these spamming campaigns had usually been for self-propagation of the threat through spam emails containing a link, often (but not always) pointing to a Waledac binary file hosted on a malicious website. The variant W32.Waledac.C is also sending out spam emails, but with a twist. ...

gHacks: Mozilla, developers of the popular Firefox web browser, have just released an update for the browser’s stable branch that moves the version to 10.0.1. The release may come as a surprise to users of Firefox 10, who were updated to that version only ten days ago. This is not the first occurrence that a critical update is released shortly after a major version upgrade of the web browser. Similar updates had to be delivered after the release of Firefox 9 and Firefox 8. ...

SophosLabs: Is it possible to fight Anonymous? The movement is proud of saying that an idea can’t be arrested or killed, but it seems like the Boston Police Department has thought of one way of fighting back: sarcasm. A week ago, the BPDNews.com website which provides news about the Boston police and crime in the area was hacked by Anonymous. The hackers replaced the home page of the site with a message and a video of American rapper KRS-One performing his song “Sound of Da Police”. ...

The H-Online: The Debian developers have pointed out, in an announcement on the debian-announce mailing list, that – three years after it was released –Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny) has reached its “End of Life”. Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 was originally released in February 2009 and on 6 February 2012, the developers stopped providing security updates for that version of the distribution. Users have now had a year to update their systems to Lenny’s successor, Squeeze, which was released on 6 February 2011. The Debian developers recommend that any installations that are still using Debian 5.0 should be updated to version 6 of the distribution immediately. The Debian community recently released version 6.0.4 of Debian Squeeze which includes all the updates that have been released for Squeeze since its release.

The Hacker News: Latest Notification in The Hacker News Vault by a Hacker named “Xenu (Casi)” from r00tw0rm Team that There are 63 Blind SQL injection Vulnerabilities exist on United Nation’s Website (www.un.org). Blind SQL injection is identical to normal SQL Injection except that when an attacker attempts to exploit an application rather then getting a useful error message they get a generic page specified by the developer instead. This makes exploiting a potential SQL Injection attack more difficult but not impossible. An attacker can still steal data by asking a series of True and False questions through sql statements. ...