Tribalwar

Stop Using Internet Explorer

Submitted by: KnightMare @ 11:19 AM | Tuesday, December 16, 2008 | (url: http://news.bbc.c...)

Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say. Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it.

Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the "underlying vulnerability" was present in all versions of the browser. Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.

Apple's Mac had more security flaws than Windows in 2007

Submitted by: KnightMare @ 09:53 AM | Wednesday, December 19, 2007 | (url: http://blogs.zdne...)

So this shows that Apple had more than 5 times the number of flaws per month than Windows XP and Vista in 2007, and most of these flaws are serious. Clearly this goes against conventional wisdom because the numbers show just the opposite and it isnt even close.

Also noteworthy is that while Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that werent present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and its something I am glad I dont use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista.

Apple releases 31 Patches

Submitted by: KnightMare @ 11:53 AM | Tuesday, December 18, 2007 | (url: http://news.yahoo...)

Monday's patches included a whopping 31 updates for the Apple operating system. The Mac OS X patches fix components ranging from the Address Book and iChat software to under-the-covers operating system components such as ColorSync, the IO Storage Family, and the Perl, Python and Ruby programming languages.

Most of these flaws theoretically could be exploited by attackers to run unauthorized software on the Mac, although some of them had other security implications, such as allowing an attacker to gain access to sensitive information or download files to the computer without authorization.

These updates are for the Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 operating systems, known as Tiger and Leopard, respectively.

Malware expodes a full fivefold increase

Submitted by: KnightMare @ 09:25 AM | Friday, November 9, 2007 | (url: http://news.yahoo...)

Malicious code that installs files such as Trojans, password stealers, keyboard loggers and other malware on users' systems registered a fivefold increase in the first half of 2007, according to research released by Microsoft at the RSA Security conference in London.
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And in the same period, 31.6 million phishing scams were detected, an increase of 150 percent over the previous six months.

The survey, sponsored by Microsoft and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, interviewed more than 3,600 security, privacy and marketing executives across a variety of industries, such as financial services, healthcare, technology and government, in the U.S., U.K. and Germany.