Vista attacked by 13-year-old virus
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Stoned.Angelina socks it to 'em A batch of laptops pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium was found to have been infected with a 13-year-old boot sector virus.â¦
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Blog: While many people believe a 15-year old created the first computer virus in 1982, I'm not so quick to agree.
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Accidents will happen A faulty signature update from Kaspersky Lab on Wednesday flagged up Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) as infected with a low-risk virus, Huhk-C. As a result the core Windows component was quarantined or worse.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - There was a little surprise buried inÂ Microsoft's monthly security bulletins Tuesday. It turns out that Microsoft had quietly slipped out one of the February fixes just days before its Jan. 30 Vista launch. The fix was for a bug in Microsoft's Malware Protection Engine, used by products like Windows Defender, OneCare, and Antigen to scan for malware. Microsoft had discovered that the engine could possibly be tricked into running unauthorized code if it scanned a specially crafted PDF file. Nobody has actually launched such an attack, but since these products are always automatically scanning for malware in the background, the vulnerability could have led to some pretty nasty exploits. Still, it's strange that Microsoft waited so long to notify its customers of the patch. It's rare for Microsoft to release one of these out-of-cycle updates, but since it adoptedÂ its monthly patch process back in October 2003, it generally lets people know about them as soon as they're released. Microsoft's Mark Griesi told me that the company decided to send out the malware engine fix as soon as it was ready on January 26 and that this kind of quick fix is standard practice with most security software. But he said there was no particular reason why the company decided to wait until February 13 to tell people about it. Microsoft just hasn't been in the position of having to patch its security software since rolling out the monthly patch process, he added. "It was one of those first-time situations: 'Should we say something now or should we just wait,'" he told me. "This time we decided to wait. We won't do it again." From a PR perspective, it wasn't a bad move. Microsoft has touted Defender as one of the top three Vista security features. It wouldn't have been much fun to be talking about a major security flaw in the product just days before the Vista launch, would it?
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Collateral damage A faulty signature update to CA's antivirus software created headaches for sys admins last week after the software falsely identified a Windows 2003 component as malware.â¦
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Computers running Microsoft Windows XP can be infected by a new Trojan horse, program remotely controlled in a victim&#39;s system, even after it is patched with Microsoft&#39;s
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Latest variant poses a risk to home and small office users.
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A feature dating back to the Internet's HTML 3.0 era is causing problems for Internet Explorer 7, forcing Microsoft to issue an update for Windows Vista just one day after its public launch. Web sites using frames causes IE7's phishing filter to evaluate the page multiple times, leading to high CPU usage.
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The Web site of AvSoft Technologies attempts to install a virus on visiting PCs, security firm warns.
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An exploit attacking the most recent Windows bug is circulating on Usenet, security experts said Tuesday, that crashes machines, yet another indicator that attackers will chase the vulnerability until they&#39;ve launched mass mailing-style worm-based attacks
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InfoWorld - The honeymoon ended early for Microsoft's Vista operating system, after word spread Wednesday about a flaw that could allow remote attackers to take advantage of the new operating system's speech recognition feature.
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A new variant of the Zafi virus attacks Google, Microsoft, and the Hungarian Prime Minister
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Microsoft urged Windows Vista users to download a new security tool that automatically disables suspicious or malicious "gadgets," the small applets that mimic the "widgets" popular on Mac OS X.Dubbed "Windows Sidebar Protection," the 1MB download was added to Windows Update on Tuesday and classified as a "high-priority" update. Microsoft customers running Vista RTM -- the initial version that launched in late 2006 to businesses and early 2007 to consumers -- saw the update on the list starting Tuesday. The update is optional, but depending on what settings have been selected in Windows' Automatic Updates, it may be downloaded and installed without any additional user interaction.Windows Sidebar is a Vista-only panel that holds the miniature applications known as gadgets -- small single-purpose tools that, for instance, display the time and date or RSS feeds. The Windows gadgets are composed of HTML and various scripts.And there's the rub, said Microsoft."Vista treats gadgets like it treats all executable code," said the advisory that accompanied the update. "Gadgets are written using HTML and script, but this HTML is not located on an arbitrary remote server as Web pages are. HTML content in the gadget is downloaded first as part of a package of resources and configuration files and then executed from the local computer."In other words, gadgets could be dangerous, even malicious. The small applications are crafted not only by Microsoft but also by third-party developers and users; Microsoft distributes gadgets on its Web site, but it doesn't vet them."The update gives us a mechanism to prevent a malicious gadget from being installed first of all, and if it's installed, to block the gadget [from running]," said Austin Wilson, a director in the Windows client product management group. "We're being proactive here. We looked at the [security] landscape and wanted this in place in case a problem arises in the future."There are no known vulnerabilities in any existing gadgets, Wilson claimed, stressing that Microsoft knows of no purposefully malicious gadgets, either.When it detects a flawed, suspicious or malicious gadget, Microsoft will create a "kill bit" file that it will then push to users through Windows Update on the regular once-a-month patch day, said Wilson. Yesterday's update included no kill bit, stressed Wilson, but instead is the tool that generates a unique ID for each gadget, accepts the list from Windows Update and then blocks existing gadgets from running or newly-downloaded gadgets from installing.After a gadget has been identified as bad, its icon gets swapped out with one labeled "Bad Gadget." The icon also can't be dragged, and the tool tip shows it as a security risk.The Sidebar security update is already integrated in the bits that were distributed as Vista Service Pack 1's release candidate last month, said Wilson, and it will be included in the final when that launches in the coming weeks.Microsoft has posted a pair of documents on its support site that go into more detail: KB943411 includes the download links to the 32- and 64-bit versions of the tool; KB941411 walks users through the various dialog boxes they will see when the tool tries to bar or block a gadget.
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Symantec - an IT security company - warned on Wednesday that computers running Microsoft Windows XP can be infected by a new Trojan horse, even though it is patched with Microsoft&#39;s latest Service Pack 2.
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The number of new viruses and worms aimed at Microsoft Corp.&#39;s ubiquitous Windows operating system rose 400 percent between January and June from the same year-earlier period, computer security company Symantec said Sunday.
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Security researchers have released attack code that will crash Windows PCs that are susceptible to a recently patched bug in the operating system.
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Company's eTrust software detects a Windows file as a virus and deletes it, causing some servers to crash and fail to reboot.