TechBlog

The H-Online: Google and other advertising companies have been found to be deliberately evading the privacy controls of Apple’s Safari browser. The evasion was revealed in a report in the Wall Street Journal and was based on work by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer. He found that the “+1” button code added to DoubleClick advertisements also allowed a Google DoubleClick tracking code to be installed on desktop Safari on 22 of the top 100 web sites. The same happened with 23 of those 100 sites when using Safari on the iPhone. ...

The H-Online: Tenable has released version 5.0 of Nessus, its popular vulnerability scanner. The new version of the tool includes an updated installation wizard that is said to make installing and configuring the server and client easier and quicker than before. Scan policies can now be created substantially faster than with previous versions, and the developers have also improved the way users navigate through the results of a vulnerability audit. ...

Symantec: The world is mourning the loss of another legendary pop singer also known as the queen of pop – Whitney Houston. Spammers are paying homage to the icon with a wicked malware. The malicious email shows a video of the last appearance of the star in a Los Angeles night club and also downloads an executable binary. This file is detected by Symantec Antivirus as WS.Reputation.1. ...

SophosLabs: Here’s a spam message I received today: Hi GCLULEY, Hi. Why the caps? And just “Graham” would be fine. Do you find ONLY having a South African passport limiting? I don’t have a South African passport, but I haven’t found its absence very limiting. Do you find your travel choices abroad restricting and visa applications frustrating? Not particularly. Do you have an exit strategy if South Africa becomes the next Zimbabwe? ...

The H-Online: A developer preview of Mac OS X 10.8 is now available to registered Mac developers after Apple announced the new version, named Mountain Lion, and previewed a number of its features. Among those features is Gatekeeper which Apple says “helps prevent you from unknowingly downloading and installing malicious software”. The Gatekeeper feature has three levels of security for running applications downloaded from the Internet; “Mac App Store”, “Mac App Store and identified developers” and “Anywhere”. The first setting only runs applications downloaded from the Mac App Store, in a style similar to the iPhone only running apps from the App Store. Unlike the iPhone though, Gatekeeper lets users allow applications from other sources. The “Mac App Store and Identified Developers” option only allows applications from the store and from developers who have signed their program with an Apple-issued Developer ID, while “Anywhere” allows any program to be downloaded and run. It is unclear how Gatekeeper interacts with software loaded from other media, such as a USB memory stick or CD/DVD. ...

SophosLabs: Facebook users overwhelmingly agree that it’s rude to post photos or videos of them without asking permission first. Some even think it should be illegal. Sophos has polled over 800 Facebook users, asking whether people should seek permission before posting photographs or videos online of others. Although a large majority – 83% – of polled Facebook users think it’s just common courtesy to ask permission before posting a photo or video of someone else (and a further 8% felt it should be illegal not to have received approval), some respondents believed that Facebook’s existing tagging controls allowed you to remove a picture that you didn’t want published online. ...

H-Online: Adobe has released updates for Flash Player closing seven holes in the application. Six of the holes can be exploited to allow an attacker to infect a PC using crafted web pages. The seventh is a cross site scripting hole that Adobe says is already being exploited in “active targeted attacks”. The attacks, which are only aimed at Internet Explorer on Windows, try to trick the user into clicking on a malicious link. Adobe say the hole “could be used to take actions on a user’s behalf on any website or webmail provider, if the user visits a malicious website”. ...

I’ve been reading from Mozilla Blog and I liked it and agree with that, so I share it with you: I read an article on the Web somewhere that there was a new LibreOffice version. It’s been several years since I gave OpenOffice a try and I’ve been interested to see what OpenOffice had evolved into, so I thought, “Hey, maybe they’ve improved some. I’ll install it and see.” Here is what happened. ...

The H-Online: Oracle has fixed 14 security holes in the Java Standard Edition (Java SE) with a critical patch update. The vulnerabilities allow attackers to use specially crafted Java WebStart applications or web services in order to install malicious code on computers that run flawed versions of Java. Oracle says that such flawed versions are particularly likely to exist on Windows computers because Windows users tend to have admin privileges. The risk is smaller under operating systems such as Linux and Solaris, the company added. ...

SophosLabs: The death of pop superstar Whitney Houston made headlines around the world this weekend, and it didn’t take long for fraudsters and cybercriminals to cash in on the singer’s death. For instance, messages have been seen shared on Facebook claiming to link to a video of Whitney Houston’s autopsy. According to the messages, the video of Whitney Houston’s autopsy “reveals a shocking secret that explains her death”. ...