Ryan Naraine

Microsoft plans to start selling the Windows OneCare Live PC security bundle for $49.95 a year for up to three personal computers. The service, which has gone through several beta revisions, will hit the market in June this year as a self-updating utility featuring virus scanning, firewall protection, data backup and PC cleanup tools. The […]

Microsofts security response team is investigating reports of a remotely exploitable buffer overflow in HTML Help Workshop, the standard help system for the Windows platform. The software vendors investigation follows the public release of a proof-of-concept exploit for the flaw, which is caused by a boundary error within the handling of a “.hhp” file. Security […]

Just two years after shelling out $23 million to acquire ActiveState, anti-virus vendor Sophos has offloaded the company to Pender Financial Group, a Canadian venture capital firm. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close within the next 30 days, the companies announced Feb. 6. For Sophos, the decision […]

The idea of delivering software as Web applications over the Internet isnt exactly new. In the 1990s, at the height of the dot-com boom, the application service provider model enjoyed moderate success. Today, with AJAX-based Web applications all the rage, the model has made a dramatic comeback, but with the same old security concerns. “The […]

Web and print publishing software maker Adobe Systems has pushed out security patches to cover a potentially serious code execution flaw in the Adobe Creative Suite 2 platform. The flaw, which carries an “important” rating, affects Adobe Creative Suite 2, Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Illustrator CS2 on both Windows and Mac OS platforms. San […]

Marc Maiffret is a worried man. The chief hacking officer and co-founder of eEye Digital Security looks at the rising popularity of hosted Web applications and sees a future where legitimate bug hunters are blocked from auditing popular product for security flaws. “How can you do an independent code audit when you have no access […]

The Mozilla Foundation has shipped the first patch for its flagship Firefox 1.5 browser to plug a series of security vulnerabilities and memory leaks. The open-source group has started pushing out Firefox 1.5.0.1 as an automatic update and recommended that all users apply the upgrade to protect against a known denial-of-service bug and several undisclosed […]

With the clock ticking on a Feb. 3 D-Day for the activation of the destructive Blackworm worm payload, anti-virus vendors are rushing to release free removal tools to help contain the damage. The worm, also known as Kama Sutra, MyWife.E or Nyxem.E, uses the lure of sexually explicit photographs to trick e-mail users into executing […]

Virus hunters combing through the wreckage of the zero-day WMF (Windows Metafile) attacks have found evidence that exploit code was being peddled by Russian hacker groups for $4,000 a pop. The first sign of an exploit was traced back to the middle of December 2005, a full two weeks before anti-virus vendors started noticing mysterious […]

An independent security researcher has pinpointed a denial-of-service flaw in Microsofts brand new Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview just moments after installing the security-centric browser makeover. Tom Ferris said could hardly believe his eyes when the new browser crashed less than 15 minutes after he started using a homemade fuzz testing tool to poke […]

Microsofts anti-malware engineering team has joined the chorus of calls for computer users to be on high alert for an e-mail worm that uses social engineering tactics to deliver a destructive payload. The company issued an official security advisory to back up a warning from its anti-malware researchers that the worm—known as Kama Sutra, Blackworm, […]

A high-powered group of security volunteers is raising an “urgent alert” for a potentially destructive e-mail worm crawling through in-boxes, warning that the worms payload is capable of destroying important documents on an infected machine. The worm, which uses the lure of sexually explicit Kama Sutra photographs to trick e-mail users into opening an attachment, […]