TechBlog

The Redmond company today announced that it plans to release 16 security bulletins on coming Tuesday, Microsoft’s official monthly Patchday in October. Never before Microsoft released so many security bulletins on a Patchday. Four of these security bulletins are rated critical by the company. Thus they allow attackers to inject malicious code into computers without user interaction. Ten get the rating important, and another two are rated moderate. Affected are all supported Windows operating systems from Windows XP to Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2003 and 2008 – not only the 32-bit flavours, but also the 64-bit versions. Also, all Microsoft Office Versions starting from Office XP are vulnerable, including Office for Mac. ...

Hmmm. That’s not what the source code says We started out the day fat fingering the spelling of “youtube.com” and ended up at the typo squatting site behind the URL “youube.com.” youube.com redirects you to http://youtube.com-prizes.com – obviously a URL intended to make you think it’s really YouTube. Like so many of these “survey” scam web sites, the offer was available “today only: Thursday, October 7, 2010.” Obviously, this is to add a little bit of sales pressure to make a visitor go for the prize ASAP, or at least before midnight. ...

Our friend in the UK got this via a contact. It was from a Twitterer who obviously had his Twitter login stolen: (Twitter apparently is filtering this URL at this point.) The link led to a phishing page that used the deceptive tactic of showing an error message: “Wrong Username/Email and password combination.” You login, it steals your Twitter password, sends the above Tweet to all your contacts and continuing rounding up passwords. ...

How does one say in French: “We’re gonna make an example out of you, boy” The Toronto Sun is reporting that convicted spammer Adam Guerbuez of Montreal has been ordered to pay $1 billion to Facebook by Quebec Superior Court. The court was upholding a U.S. Federal court fine that resulted from a wave of four million spam ads sent to Facebook users in 2008. Guerbuez did not contest the Sept. 28 Quebec Superior Court ruling. ...

Adobe just released Reader and Acrobat version 9.4. The new release fixes some critical vulnerabilities which allow attackers to infect PCs – for example, just by browsing the net. Overall the update lists 23(!) entries in the CVE database as being solved with version 9.4. The new version is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix systems. For those who still use the version 8, Reader and Acrobat 8.2.5 for Windows and Mac fix the security vulnerabilities. Windows and Mac users can download the updated version at Adobes download center, while Unix users need to download the new release from Adobe’s ftp server.

Stuxnet continues to be a hot topic. Here are answers to some of the questions we’ve received. Q: What is Stuxnet? A: It’s a Windows worm, spreading via USB sticks. Once inside an organization, it can also spread by copying itself to network shares if they have weak passwords. Q: Can it spread via other USB devices? A: Sure, it can spread anything that you can mount as a drive. Like a USB hard drive, mobile phone, picture frame and so on. ...

Windows Live Essentials 2011 is now out of beta. Download links in bottom of page. This package contain most essential programs needed for your digital life: Windows Live Essentials 2011 Advanced made easy Do more with Windows on your PC with free programs from Microsoft for photos, movies, instant messaging, email, social networking, and more. Get it all in one simple download. To see if your system support this program, check System requirements ...

During our analysis of the different malware families we sometimes stumble upon some messages inside the viruses placed there by their authors. For example, the TDSS Trojan family is known to contain random strings from “Hamlet” and from the Bible. Also there is the Koobface family which contains random sentences – mostly taken from Wikipedia articles, like in the last variant we discovered, about the Tower of London. TDSS: ...

The Stuxnet Trojan is very well covered in the media as more and more details about its sophisticated code become public. It abuses four previously unknown security vulnerabilities in Windows to enter the system and is specialized on attacking Siemens processing systems. An interesting information which didn’t get much attention yet comes from heise Security: The nuclear plant in Busheer isn’t really the target of the worm as rumours say, as the attacked systems aren’t approved for usage in nuclear plants.

Google has finally decided to allow users to turn off the controversial ‘conversation view’ threading functionality in Gmail. Conversation view has been a characteristic of Gmail ever since it launched, but Google software engineer Dong Chen admitted in a blog post yesterday that it is the webmail service’s “most hotly debated feature “. “Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages, and that their inboxes are much less cluttered,” he wrote. ...