| Author | Message | ||
     Reepicheep |
Just a heads up that there is a windows Internet Explorer vulnerabilty (it has been known for about a week now), and exploits against it have been found in the wild now. It could lead to total system compromise if you just view the wrong website. If you are lucky, that would be just a driveby spyware install, if you are not lucky it will be a keystroke logger and you are about to become somebodies hobby  Microsoft will no doubt have patches out soon. In the meantime, you can turn off active scripting in IE, use firefox, or just try and avoid bad "internet neighborhoods" and suspicious emails, and just hope for the best (which I would NOT recommend). This is status "yellow" now, which means that though the sky is not currently falling, all the things are in place such the sky could fall at a moments notice. The race between the punks and the patchers now begins.... | ||
| Mikej |
Coming soon to a monitor near you:  | ||
| Blake |
Bill, Thanks for the heads up! Would all machines be vulnerable or only those not protected by a firewall? I'm so irrationally paranoid that I run both a hardware and software firewall. LOL. Silly I know. | ||
| Reepicheep |
It passes right through a firewall, as it will be delivered as a part of a web page or an email, and you have told your firewalls to let this type of traffic pass. If a standard "boilerplate" exploit starts to get around, the antivirus and antispyware software will get signatures for the normal popular variations and stop them, but custom made attacks, or attacks that hit before your updates get to you, would walk right though. Running a hardware and software firewall is not irrational at all, that is a normal baseline security deployment these days. | ||
| Skyguy |
I flushed Explorer in favor of Mozilla Firefox long ago. I would recommend everyone does the same. The entire staff of loma Linda hospital was moved to Firefox a year ago. To darn many holes in Explorer. | ||
| Seanp |
Opera, baby! | ||
| Mrvvrroomm |
firefox | ||
| Chainsaw |
Safari! | ||
| Blake |
More info at... http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/security/Content/17196.html | ||
| Reepicheep |
wget! lynx! Thats the hole Blake. I suspect we will be seeing an emergency out of cycle patch from Microsoft soon, there are exploits in the wild now. Looks like it could be possible to trigger it by viewing an email with outlook as well, which is where it could *really* grow feet. So far though, the sky has not fallen. | ||
| Blake |
No more Outlook for me. Gmail rocks!  | ||
| Buellbozo |
Blake, Gmail?? What is it and how do I get off Outlook? Computer idiot, so use small words and speak slowly. Thanks.  | ||
| Blake |
Free and easy. Give it a try. I highly recommend it. http://gmail.google.com/ Thanks to Bill (Reepicheep) for introducing me to GMail. | ||
| Reepicheep |
If anyone needs a gmail invite, just email me, they are pretty easy to come by these days. If you are having trouble with email, I can post some here, just ask. It's nicely done. Don't get freaked out by the context sensitive adds, they will track what is the topic of your email conversation. Humans don't look at it, a computer program does, and the advertisers don't know what you are looking at. The way it works is an advertiser buys "key word hits". So DaveS might decide to say he will pay google to put an add for a Uly beside any email that contains the words "adventure want motorcycle expensive". He will know if you click his add (google will bill him) but won't know what your email really said. If you never click the adds, nobody knows nutin. They are actually helpful often, for example when I was emailing people about GPS units. Thats how I found the refurbed Garmin Quest. They can be kinda freaky though, it looks like google is reading your mail That being said, as an information security weenie, I would not be putting the company crown jewels into google email. For home use, it is great though. | ||
| Tq_freak |
GMAIL RULES!!! I have been on it for over a year, Buellbozo if you need an invite just PM me and ill give you one, I got a ton and i never use them | ||
| Brad_buell |
Firefox and Gmail.....!  You REALLY need to stop using IE and/or Outlook! | ||
| Bake |
Thanks again Bill Gates, hope you are enjoying your billions! | ||
| Seanp |
Well, I actually use Outlook for work, because it's what everyone uses, (US Government system...) I actually like Outlook, and I have it synched with my PDA, and my whole life is in my .pst file. But I also did things like crank up the security, etc., and I have multiple backups of everything, so if I lose something I am only a day or two behind. I'm extremely anal about backing things up... | ||
| Bigdaddy |
Micro$oft is working on it, but don't expect anything until April 11th. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/917077.mspx You just gotta love Micro$oft -- NOT! Here's a fix,,,,please proceed with caution and feel free to ask questions or PM me with questions,,,, http://www.instalinux.com/cgi-bin/coe_bootimage.cgi | ||
| Blake |
Outlook does offer a lot of great features for the workplace environment, meetings and resource scheduling (conference rooms), task assignments, and all the work-group functionality stuff is great, a huge efficiency booster. If one can type, a dedicated secretary is pretty much a thing of the past for many professionals these days. I have real trouble imagining with any kind of satisfaction what our world might be like without Bill Gates and Microsoft. I suffered through a lot more frustrations back in the early '90s when I was using Unix on an RS6000 than I ever have on a PC running Windows. Don't even get me started on the old mainframe days. The horror! The depressing thing is that if folks were honest, there would be no need for software to be 100% hacker-proof. Bill Gates, what an amazing and driven man. Deriding him seems to me to be about on par with complaining about Henry Ford for popularizing the automobile. Then again, not sure folks are prone to have fatal accidents while using/misusing Microsoft products. I can drink and web-surf without worrying too much about the consequences. ![: ]](http://www.badweatherbikers.com/buell/clipart/proud.gif) Some folks sure are funny, resenting those who are successful. Go Boeing! Go IBM! Go Microsoft! Go Starbucks! Go Harley-Davidson! Go GM? D'OH!  LOL! Does anyone recall the days before Windows, no cut and paste buffer; no interfunctionalality between Word Perfect and Quatro Pro or Lotus 123? The state of computing today is truly miraculous to me. Pretty sure Microsoft has done a lot of amazing work in support of of it. Again, the goofs are to be expected. What commercial product is ever perfect out of the box. Windoze 95? ACK! I can sure understand how IT professionals might develop a sour view of MS though. Having to deal with issues on a continual basis would get old. I'm hopeful that MS will honor their recently declared credo that they will henceforth cease shipping product before its time, so to speak. BadWeB does run on a Linux system. Would that we had put all our eggs in MS stock back in the day. Doubt we'd be complaining much about MS or Bill Gates now if we had been so blessed. | ||
| Buellbozo |
Thanks to all for GMail info. Too busy this morning, but I'll get on it this evening. Thanks again. |
