Ryan Naraine

As are coming fast and furious, including at least two for the nasty MS06-070 worm hole. If you are in charge of a Windows 2000 shop, there’s no excuse to delay patch deployment for this one.

The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers. Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru […]

Proof-of-concept exploit code offering step-by-step instructions to attack worm holes in Microsoft Windows have started appearing on the Internet, prompting a new round of “patch-now-or-else” warnings from computer security experts. The exploits, publicly released on the Milw0rmWeb site and privately available to partners of penetrating testing firm Immunity, target a pair of critical vulnerabilities patched […]

You might be surprised to learn that the mysterious hacker behind the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) project actually believes in responsible disclosure. For the entire month of November, the man known simply as “LMH” is releasing a daily proof-of-concept exploit for unpatched kernel-level flaws in operating systems — including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X […]

Microsoft just cant seem to pull the plug on Software Update Services 1.0. The Redmond, Wash., company was all set to retire the patch distribution software on Dec. 6, 2006, but after listening to what it is described as “customer feedback,” Microsoft has extended support for SUS 1.0 for another seven months. The extension means […]

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday express has dropped off six security bulletins covering at least nine vulnerabilities (not counting those silently fixed thingies). The IE and XML Core Services bugs are getting all the attention but security experts are most nervous about MS06-070, which covers a nasty, wormable flaw in Workstation Service.

A new study sanctioned by Mozilla declares Firefox 2 as a big winner over Microsofts IE 7 in the battle to block ID theft scam sites, but weaknesses in both browsers confirm that the battle against phishing has only just begun. The open-source group on Nov. 14 released results of a third-party test that showed […]

Microsoft on Nov. 14 released a critical cumulative update for its flagship Internet Explorer browser to fix a flaw that was being used in targeted zero-day attacks since early October. The IE update (MS06-067) provides cover for code execution holes in DirectAnimation ActiveX controls that could be exploited if unexpected data is passed to the […]

eEye Digital Security has flagged a high-severity flaw in an unnamed Adobe product and warned that millions of Windows users are at risk of remote code execution attacks. A bland notice on the company’s upcoming advisories page said the flaw was reported and confirmed by Adobe. I pinged eEye’s Marc Maiffret for some additional details […]

In response to my Q&A with Joanna Rutkowska, the stealth malware researcher who used AMD’s SVM/Pacifica virtualization technology to create malware (Blue Pill) that’s “100 percent undetectable,” AMD’s PR team wrote in to challenge those claims, arguing that the addition of AMD Virtualization to AMD processors does not increase the vulnerability of the operating system. […]

My latest OnSecurity podcast is a fun interview with Dave Goldsmith, the former @Stake co-founder who runs the Matasano Security pen testing team. We gab about the state of vulnerability research, the never-ending flaw disclosure controversity, the buzz around fuzz testing tools and, naturally, whether Windows Vista will significantly change the security game.

Security researchers have discovered a kernel-mode code execution vulnerability in a driver that ships with the popular D-Link DWL-G132 Wi-Fi adapter. The $65 USB adapter ships with a version of a vulnerable driver (A5AGU.SYS) that could be exploited by hackers to cause a stack-based buffer overflow, according to an advisory posted as part of the […]