TechBlog

Microsoft Malware Protection Center: On March 14, Adobe released a security advisory (APSA11-01) warning of 0-day attacks affecting Adobe Flash Player (versions earlier than and including 10.2.152.33). These attacks were hidden inside Microsoft Excel documents that were used as a vehicle to deliver the exploit. The Adobe Flash file embedded inside the Excel file is another carrier for the exploit. It loads shellcode inside memory, performs heap-spraying, and loads a Flash byte stream from memory to exploit the 0-day vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2011-0609. ...

Sophos Labs: Good news on the social networking security front is that Twitter has finally got its act together to offer an Always use HTTPS option. If you turn on this option, all of your personalized interaction with Twitter will be encrypted – not only while you are logging in, but also while you are posting tweets. A lot of people fail to recognize the value of using HTTPS on Twitter. As long as your username and password are sent over HTTPS, so no-one can sniff them out of the ether, who cares if your tweets go over plain HTTP? After all, a tweet is meant to be public. ...

Nude photos and videos of Vanessa Hudgens, the star of “High School Musical”, have surfaced on the net, with speculation rife that they have been released by a hacker who broke into the 22-year-old’s Gmail account. So far, so normal for saucy celebrity news. But what’s different on this occasion is that not only has Vanessa Hudgens reported to have met law enforcement officers to discuss the crime, but as many as 50 other celebrities are said to have been targeted by a hacking gang dead set on stealing compromising snaps and information. ...

The latest Chrome Dev Channel release comes with a new Chrome logo that’s more plain and boring, but looks better as a desktop icon. Even if not many people will switch to a different browser just because they don’t like the new logo, Chrome lost some of its magic by switching to a visual identity that’s no longer vibrant and picturesque. Here’s the new Chrome icon: … and the old Chrome icon: ...

In a bid to make Google Docs more appealing to workers and consumers, Google is rolling out a new feature that lets users of its productivity service discuss shared documents in real-time. The upgrade is aimed at helping users resolve issues faster. The new discussion feature is also part of Google’s ongoing effort to dethrone Microsoft Office as the leader in productivity apps. By enabling more real-time discussions, Google is building off the strength of its cloud-based approach to apps and recognizes the way users increasingly are accustomed to communicating online. ...

Google Operation System: After Google released Chrome, Google Toolbar’s development slowed down. That’s because Google Toolbar is no longer the primary vehicle for adding browser features and Google mostly focused on improving Chrome. Google Toolbar 8 is a completely new version of Google’s add-on that was available as part of Google Labs. “Google Toolbar 8 is actually built and runs on top of the Google Chrome Frame platform. This means that Toolbar 8 will run more like a web app in that it can be customized and updated much more frequently and easily. It also means that Google Chrome Frame is installed at the time of Toolbar 8 installation,” explains Google. ...

Google Operation System: Internet Explorer 9 will be released later today and one of the many new features is the native support for videos. Unfortunately for Google, Microsoft decided to only support H.264 videos by default, so you can’t watch WebM videos without installing additional software. To solve this problem, Google developed a WebM plugin for IE9. “They said elephants couldn’t ride flying dolphins. They said that one of the world’s most popular browsers couldn’t play WebM video in HTML5. They were wrong,” mentions Google half-jokingly. ...

isc.sans.edu: Microsoft released version 9 of its Internet Explorer web browser. You can download IE 9 from windows.microsoft.com. Microsoft also set up a domain dedicated to the new browser: www.beautyoftheweb.com. Unfortunately, that site isn’t hosted under the microsoft.com domain, nor does it have an SSL certificate to confirm that it belongs to Microsoft. Using this site to distribute the browser goes against the advice of downloading software only from known vendor websites. Copycat malicious sites claiming to distribute IE 9 will probably appear shortly, if they aren’t around yet. ...

I just read an interesting post in ThinkVitamin.com and wanted to share with you: I just signed up for a new Twitter account and as I was going through the on-boarding process, I noticed Twitter has introduced a bit of Gamification to encourage you to follow more people. They use a simple progress-bar metaphor to encourage you to follow 10 people. I like it.

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