Support Wars

From Ars Technica: Now that we’re past the halfway point of 2010, it’s starting to become apparent that the browser trends we’ve noted over the past several months are no longer holding. Sure, Safari and Opera are still slowly gaining share, but the three big guys are restless. Firefox has started declining, Chrome’s growth spurt [...]

From SecurityFocus: The cybercriminals behind the Zeus botnet used Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to host the central server used to control a portion of the compromised machines, security firm CA stated on Thursday. The company found that infected machines would contact a server hosted in Amazon’s cloud to download updates and additional functionality to [...]

From ISC SANS: The almost universally installed flash player of adobe has been update to version 10.0.42.34. Adobe air was upgraded as well to version 1.5.3. Read more about it in the apsb09-19 bulletin from adobe. The reason behind it are 7 vulnerabilities: CVE-2009-3794, CVE-2009-3796, CVE-2009-3797, CVE-2009-3798, CVE-2009-3799, CVE-2009-3800 and, CVE-2009-3951 of which 6 lead [...]

From Wired’s This Day in Tech: 1999: The Recording Industry Association of America sues Napster, the online, peer-to-peer file sharing service that’s allowing millions of computer users to score free, copyright music. The rules are about to change. Napster founder Shawn Fanning won rock-star celebrity with the service. But music-industry heads were spinning. So, the [...]

From the Google Code Blog: Today, as part of our efforts to make the web faster, we are announcing Google Public DNS, a new experimental public DNS resolver. The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s “phone book”. Every time you visit a website, your computer performs a [...]

From ZDnet: Security researchers have stumbled upon a new piece of ransomware that blocks an infected computer from accessing the Internet until a fee is paid via SMS (text message). According CA researcher Zarestel Ferrer, the ransomware file is bundled with a program called uFast Download Manager.  Once a machine is infected, a message is [...]

From US-CERT: US-CERT is aware of public reports of malicious code circulating via phishing email messages that appear to come from the Social Security Administration. The messages indicate that the users’ annual Social Security statements may contain errors and instruct users to follow a link to review their Social Security statement. If users click this [...]

A new zero day exploit has been reported for IE 6 and 7.  From Symantec: A new exploit targeting Internet Explorer was published to the BugTraq mailing list yesterday. Symantec has conducted further tests and confirmed that it affects Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 as well. The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, [...]

From Schneier on Security: File deletion is all about control. This used to not be an issue. Your data was on your computer, and you decided when and how to delete a file. You could use the delete function if you didn’t care about whether the file could be recovered or not, and a file [...]

From Security Focus: Users of the WordPress blogging platform need to beware of a worm making the rounds of Web sites, if they have not updated their software in the last month, the developers of the popular blogging software said over the weekend. The malicious program affects blogs that use WordPress, and which have not [...]