Monday 10/19/09

Mozilla unblocks one sneaky Microsoft plug-in
... Late on Friday, Mozilla added .Net Framework Assistant and the accompanying Windows Presentation Foundation plug-in to its rarely-used blocking list, which then threw up a warning to users notifying them that the pair was being barred from Firefox.

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Microsoft issues first Windows 7 patches
Windows 7 was affected by nine of the 34 vulnerabilities, or 26% of the total.
Windows Vista, meanwhile, was impacted by 19 of the 34 vulnerabilities -- 56% of the total.
Windows XP was affected by the most vulnerabilities of all: 24 out of 34, or 71% of the total.

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Phishers Reveal Poor Passwords


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Medical Records: Stored in the Cloud, Sold on the Open Market
... unknown to patients, an increasing number of outside vendors that manage electronic health records also have access to that data, and are reselling the information as a commodity.
http://www.patientprivacyrights.org/site/DocServer/Zones_of_Privacy.pdf?docID=881

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ASCII Art spam is back
The ASCII art spam is not limited to only non-word characters. It can be numbers, alphabets and combinations of all, which can make things even worse for certain spam filters:

d""b8 88 db 88 88 dP"Y8
dP 88 dPYb 88 88 `bo
Yb 88 dP__Yb 88 88 `Y8b
boodP 88 dP""""Yb 88ood8 88 8bodP'

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How hackers find your weak spots
While there are an infinite number of social engineering exploits, typical ones include the...

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SECURITY: RISK AND REWARD
New secure password rules
Most companies have some form of policy on passwords. The rules go back more than a decade and are repeated...

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Hiring hackers: A rebuttal (part 2)
The original articles on hiring hackers and criminal hackers into IT groups as programmers, network...

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38 Oracle security patches coming next week

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Scareware earns cybercriminals £850,000 a year
Cybercriminals are earning as much as £858,000 a year out of scareware, says Symantec.

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A Guide to Windows 7 Security
Until now, Windows Vista was the most secure version of the Windows operating system. Windows 7...

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"Google Voice Mails have been discovered in Google's search engine, providing audio files, names, and phone number as if you were logged in and checking your own voice mail. Some appear to be test messages, while others are clearly not. Google has since disabled indexing of voice mails outside your own website."

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Helpful Hint for Fugitives: Don't Update Your Location on Facebook
"Fugitive caught after updating his status on Facebook."

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Microsoft's Free AV Got 1.5 Million Downloads in First Week PC World – Fri Oct 16, 3:10 pm ET
Microsoft registered more than 1.5 million downloads of its free antivirus software in the week after it shipped.

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