Windows LNK vulnerability

There has been quite a bit of talk in security circles with regard to the latest 0day Windows LNK (short-cut) vulnerability, which has potential to be fairly serious.  There are partial fixes and workarounds but not a complete patch as yet.  The following links should help you get informed and cover your bases: http://www.sophos.com/products/free-tools/sophos-windows-shortcut-exploit-protection-tool.html http://www.sophos.com/security/topic/shortcut.html

NO IP for you

http://technology.canoe.ca/2010/07/26/14833401.html 340 days worth of IPv4 address space left – can IPv6 save the day? Gone will be the familiar 4 octet (32-bit) addresses like 123.123.123.123, replaced instead with something like 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334 – hexadecimal 128-bit.  Will certainly take some getting use to. IPv4 address space exhaustion can be blamed on many factors, the exploding accessibility …

Mind Your Tapes

Most businesses still rely on the venerable tape drive and tape media for backup and archiving, but what is your strategy for those tapes when not in the drive?  Bare minimum is to rotate tapes offsite to prevent a building fire or other disaster from wiping out all your data.  Some people will take them …

Does this file taste funny to you?

Reminds me of a joke – Q:  Why don’t cannibals eat clowns? A:  They taste funny. Of course, this entry is not about cannibals, clowns or peculiar appetites – it’s about what to do when you find a suspicious file on a machine, especially if that machine has been acting strangely and you think something …

Intrusion Detection – not just for the enterprise

Intrusion Detection can really be a variety of technologies – NIDS, IPS, HIPS (Network Intrustion Detection, Intrusion Prevention System, Host Intrusion Prevention System).  The difference between these is pretty straight-forward, NIDS uses a sensor or sensors to monitor network traffic and alert on anomalies, detection is usually signature-based.  IPS is a NIDS setup that is …

Auto Application Changes Could Spell Trouble

Changes to the auto application mandated by the Ontario government poses some serious repercussions for Ontario brokerages.  From the looks of things the new app will be part of the TAM 10.5 upgrade due out in August.  As already discussed in the appliedusers forums we are already seeing issues with the 10.x TAM versions and …

APR and Apache upgrade

For the second time, I have run into a snag upgrading PHP, and Apache 2.x due to an Apache Portable Runtime dependency.  It’s a bit of an annoying snag, that on FreeBSD at least (if you are one who uses ports) requires some fancy footwork. According to /usr/ports/UPDATING you need to: pkg_delete -f apache-2.\* portupgrade …