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Anti Virus(AV) and Anti-Malware software has always been a necessary evil to me. I managed to go on for years without installing any type of such protection because I believed that if you are an experienced enough user, you won’t be infected. I saw no reason for installing an additional piece of software on my system that would eat up precious RAM and instigate disk activity without any direct benefit to me except protection from some “unknown and harmful software”. Years passed by and I got non...
This Solution Accelerator provides instructions and recommendations to help strengthen the security of computers running the Hyper-V role on Windows Server® 2008. It covers three core topics: hardening Hyper-V, delegating virtual machine management, and protecting virtual machines. Download
Yesterday, Microsoft has released an out of band patch (in other words, not through the standard cycle of releases,which means it’s really important and there is no time to wait for the next cycle) for all Windows version. Such a release, obviously causes concerns (as does everything that is not routine). The patch is intended for all Windows versions, and it is supposed to plug a hole in the Server service (specifically RPC) that might allow an attacker to run arbitrary code under the system account...
Two researchers claim to have found a way to circumvent both Data Execution Protection (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). These techniques are meant to protect the way information is stored in RAM, ASLR is relatively new and it randomizes the way that DLLs are loaded on startup dealing a sever blow to anyone that would try to estimate which space in RAM a worm would need to overwrite during a buffer overflow attack. The researchers (Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS...
Haven’t managed to go through a book from cover to back in a long time. Well, the draught has been broken. I picked up “Administering Windows Vista Security The big surprises” (known henceforth as ‘the book’) and just finished reading it cover to back. Summing it up:One of the better technical books I read in a long time. The book covers security issues related to Windows Vista with the correct balance of theory and practice, while the authors (Mark Minasi, Byron Hynes and Jennifer Allen) do a great...
The last few days(actually almost a month now) have been very exciting in the relatively “boring” world of DNS. In that world nothing much changes…DNS has been around for quite a while now and it has always helped us translate friendly names into long and daunting numbers (IP addresses). It did so in a reliable and predicable manner. Yet that soothing effect of predictability seems to have gotten it into trouble. According to security researcher Dan Kaminsky , a vulnerability exists in the NDS implementation...
Continuing my Microsoft fanboy weekend- In an article called: Microsoft vs. Apple: Who patches zero-days faster? (by Computeworld ) the writer describes a research done by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The research looked at how many times in the past six years did the two vendors (Microsoft and Apple) have a patch ready for a zero day vulnerability. In other words they tried to designate (using statistics) which of the two companies is better to react when a vulnerability is discovered...
Ok,so as a Microsoft fanboy it is my turn to gloat. Vista Ultimate still stands strong after the 2nd day of the PWN 2 OWN contest. Basically the contest provides three laptops that have Windows Vista Ultimate, OSX 10.5.2 and Ubuntu. The hacker receives a prize of 10k and the laptop he hacks... After the first day(only network attacks were allowed) all three systems were still standing on the 2nd day contestants were allowed to instruct organizers to work on the systems...Charlie Miller (responsible...
The theory Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC) is an additional layer of security built into Vista and Windows 2008. This particular layer helps Windows protect itself from harmful intentional and unintentional changes to important objects. Among the objects protected we can find files, directories, registry key, printers, and actually any object that has a security descriptor. The beauty of MIC is that it has been there in the background all along protecting you, yet you never knew it existed. You...
Anonymity is a commodity that most of us have lost in this age. At times though, you may still attempt to seek anonymity so you can avoid being hit by a barrage of junk or due to the fact that you do not trust a specific website(that requires you to register using a valid e-mail address) that you wish to use (oxymoron,but curiosity did kill the cat-who can blame him?!). For such cases I have found the following service: 10 Minute Mail . You will be provided with an address for 10 minutes and a web...
This might be somewhat old but it still strikes me as odd. It seems that every process on the iPhone runs as root, which basically means that if one process is breached it will have full access to the whole system. When looking at this situation, on one hand you might be confident that your software has no security flaw, thus you have nothing to worry about or you have made a mistake. A process/user should not run with higher privileges then the ones he really needs, even administrators should be...