| MBR Rootkit, A New Breed of Malware
Well almost. Many many years ago the “first” pc virus named “Brain” was also an MBR |
Browsing Posts in Windoz
Today Microsoft launched a blog about the internals of their IT security research and patch development process. There are already some posts that you will not find in the official security bulletins or KB articles. One of the posts says, ‘We periodically identify workarounds or mitigations like this that we can’t use for official guidance because they’re either too nuanced or have some exception cases. When we discover something potentially useful but are uncomfortable listing it in the bulletin, we’ll do our best to describe it here in this blog.’ It looks like Microsoft is making an effort to become more ‘open’ in the area of security research and communication.
No royalties to pay in interop deal?
The Samba team has reached an agreement with Microsoft, with the software giant agreeing to disclose technical and legal information to the software libre project. Samba is by far the most widely-used software stack that allows non-Microsoft computer to talk to Windows machines, and use proprietary Microsoft network services.…
The software maker creates a single business unit, called Connected TV, to handle its Internet Protocol television, Media Center PC, and HD DVD efforts. [From Microsoft quietly combines TV efforts]
Xen or VMWare? What’s your choice?:
Two days after VMWare had one of the most successful IPOs on recent years, and one day after XenSource announces that it is being acquired by Citrix. Money is flowing into the two major virtualization players at a rate we haven’t yet seen, what are your feelings about using Xen or VMWare on Linux?
Russia’s Bomber Force Resumes Long-Range Patrolling:
Russia’s strategic bombers have not ranged far from home since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Vladimir Putin orders the resumption of long-range missions, mostly to give the American flyboys something to think about.
Teredo is a platform-independent protocol developed by Microsoft, which is enabled by default in Windows Vista. Teredo provides a way for nodes located behind an IPv4 NAT to connect to IPv6 nodes on the Internet. However, by tunneling IPv6 traffic over IPv4 UDP through the NAT and directly to the end node, Teredo raises some security concerns.
Again, this post is slightly off topic since I’m on vacation, but I wanted to point out a source for good freeware utilities for Windows. I was looking for a good Windows outliner program and not having much luck and my Flex guru buddy Bruce Eckel pointed this site out to me. If you’re looking for a bit torrent client, a photo organizer, HTML editor, registry editor or any of a few dozen other items, this site will spare you the tedious research. The recommended outliner, Keynote, is available under an open source license, but it’s no longer in active development.
FBI Finds Abuse In Getting Terrorism, Spy Records:
Use TOR, anonymous remailers, etc to protect yourself. It’s a large mean jungle out there. Remember not long ago when Google refused to give up customer data? Well it seems now US ISPs are giving out more data than they have too. ATT is one of these.
A password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems.
[License: Freeware| Requires: Win All | Size: 5.96 Mb]
It will light up many AV…
Mark Russinovich on Windows Kernel Security:
The final part of his three part series, Mark Russinovich wraps up his look at changes made in the Windows Vista Kernel by exploring advancements in reliability, recovery, and security. “Applications written for Windows Vista can, with very little effort, gain automatic error recovery capabilities by using the new transactional support in NTFS and the registry with the Kernel Transaction Manager. When an application wants to make a number of related changes, it can either create a Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) transaction and a KTM transaction handle, or create a KTM handle directly and associate the modifications of the files and registry keys with the transaction. If all the changes succeed, the application commits the transaction and the changes are applied, but at any time up to that point the application can roll back the transaction and the changes are then discarded.”
Schneier on Vista’s DRM provisions:
Security expert Bruce Schneier has written an interesting essay about Vista. Windows Vista includes an array of features that you do not want. These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure. They willl make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features wont do anything useful. In fact, they are working against you
Ok, I thought this Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart was kind of funny. (Click on the link below and then open up the PDF.) The weird thing is everyone’s been talking about Vista for so friggin’ long, I didn’t even realize it was launching this week. It was five years in the making, so I’m sure it’s an improvement over XP, but does it really matter any more? For a slightly more serious perspective, check out John Stewart’s interview with Bill Gates from the Daily Show via YouTube or read the reviews below.
- BBSpot: Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart
- YouTube: Bill Gates on the Daily Show
- YouTube: Apple Ad Spoof
- MIT Technology Review: Uninspiring Vista
- WSJ: Vista: Worthy, Largely Unexciting
- OnDisruption: Vista Overshoots Market
- PC Mag: Vista: The Ho-Hum Launch, Does Vista Matter?
The veteran WSJ tech commentator gives his verdict. He’s not terribly impressed. After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. However, while navigation has been improved, Vista isn’t a breakthrough in ease of use. Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn’t been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.
Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple’s operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.
There are some big downsides to this new version of Windows. To get the full benefits of Vista, especially the new look and user interface, which is called Aero, you will need a hefty new computer, or a hefty one that you purchased fairly recently. The vast majority of existing Windows PCs won’t be able to use all of Vista’s features without major hardware upgrades. They will be able to run only a stripped-down version, and even then may run very slowly.
In fact, in my tests, some elements of Vista could be maddeningly slow even on new, well-configured computers Also, despite Vista’s claimed security improvements, you will still have to run, and keep updating, security programs, which can be annoying and burdensome. Microsoft has thrown in one such program free, but you will have to buy at least one more. That means that, while Vista has eased some of the burden on users imposed by the Windows security crisis, it will still force you to spend more time managing the computer than I believe people should have to devote…
Brief: Exploit released for unpatched ActiveX flaw:
Exploit released for unpatched ActiveX flaw
