Posted on 06/15/2016 6:01:38 PM PDT by Utilizer
Microsoft is today closing off a vulnerability that one Chinese researcher claims has “probably the widest impact in the history of Windows.” Every version of the Microsoft operating system going back to Windows 95 is affected, leaving anyone still running unsupported operating systems, such as XP, in danger of being surreptitiously surveilled.
According to Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, the bug can be exploited silently with a “near-perfect success rate”, as the problems lie in the design of Windows. The ultimate impact? An attacker can hijack all a target’s web use, granting the hacker ”Big Brother power”, as soon as the victim opens a link or plugs in a USB stick, claimed Yu. He received $50,000 from Microsoft’s bug bounty program for uncovering the weakness, which the researcher has dubbed BadTunnel. Microsoft issued a fix today in its Patch Tuesday list of updates.
“Even security software equipped with active defense mechanisms are not able to detect the attack,” Yu told FORBES. “Of course it is capable of execute malicious code on the target system if required.”
Yu, who is one of only three ever recipients of more than $100,000 Microsoft bounty, said there are myriad ways a hacker could exploit the flaw. “This vulnerability can be exploited through Edge, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and many other third-party software on Windows,” Yu added. “It can also be exploited through web servers … or even through thumb drives – insert the thumb drive into one of the ports on the system and the exploitation is complete.”
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Thanks, mate. Don’t know how it got changed but appreciate the corrected link, no doubt.
...and it appears to have changed yet again! Wot th’ ‘ell?
-and again! :
Right... I am confused... *blink, blink*
I laff too (when I hear about ‘garage bands’), I think of Bill.
My area was Mass (DEC... eh, you know the names). We may have had some similar acquaintances.
(seems too few know of what we speak concerning DOS/MS, similar to Dems and socialism/comm?)
Kept that thing running for 4 years by slashing and burning with Ccleaner.
So I went over to support.microsoft.com to find out how to do that. For XP, step 1 is "On the desktop, right-click My Network Places, and then click Properties."
But I have no My Network Places. What now?
> I as well. I resisted for the longest time migrating to the ‘doze environment since it was so bloated and sluggish.
No reason you can't have the best of both worlds at once. Just make an MS-DOS VM (using the DOS that came with Win98), like this:
And no, that's not photoshopped. It's a screensnap from my Mac running VMware Fusion a few minutes ago, with a DOS window over a Win10 window.
Load Linux. My cleanup problems are tiny. I you have to reload, never have to register anything.
I gave it 100MB of hard disk, same as the biggest disk I ever had with DOS, back in 1988 on a Toshiba T-100 portable.
The only thing that's really odd is trying to allocate ONLY a couple of MB of RAM to the VM. I settled on 16MB, since my Toshiba had 8MB and I occasionally found that limiting.
Thanks, but no.
i shall leave the electronic abacus’ future to you youngsters.
obtw, you guys will still be backwards compatible for us old dosbastards won’t ya? (even if we seem to stop at Win 8.1 and are able to make the shuffle shuffle shuffle to that linux fella?
(not being too sarcastic, just a little bit, with good intentions)
Yep, Steve Gibson at GRC had that bindings fix for Win 95/98. Bind everything to netbui which is not a transport portical. Not sure if he is aware of this recent news. Be interested to hear from him.
Btw, he says to eliminate system admininstrator completely and use your computer only as a user. I’m not sure I have that exactly correct but I’m reading up on it now
oh darn, I didn’t close my thing... good thing it ain’t the old times, that woulda shut down the whole site.
Bet there aren’t many who remember that?
/>
Eric Von Zipper... ya gotta close yah zipper >>>>
You would need to get into your network adapter’s settings. In XP, you would go to “Device Manager,” I believe.
“Network places” are servers and such available to be seen by your computer.
That looks interesting, however I have not yet had the opportunity to learn how exactly to set up a VM to run the things I most wish to. Not exactly the best HowTo documentation available for VM setups even to this day. :(
One of these days I plan on getting up to speed in the VM department since it looks so interesting, but for now I am relegated to switching between machines for the various flavours of Operating Systems I need to perform various tasks.
I look forward to running many older programs again once I have the capability, and I can think of a few programs used (and written, back on floppy disk) that I would love to play with once again.
Cheers!
“Btw, he says to eliminate system admininstrator completely and use your computer only as a user. I’m not sure I have that exactly correct but I’m reading up on it now”
You don’t eliminate anything AFAIK. You just assign yourself a user account so that you aren’t running as the administrator. But the admin account is still there for you when you need it.
Bless you for that kindness. I'm 64.
> obtw, you guys will still be backwards compatible for us old dosbastards won’t ya? (even if we seem to stop at Win 8.1 and are able to make the shuffle shuffle shuffle to that linux fella?
Sure thing.
And bless you for your offer on -your- profile page, matching new donors' contributions (up to $300). That's almost enough incentive to make me create a new screen name (my present one is already a monthly donor) just so I can take advantage of your generosity!
FRegards, dayglored
I remember that.
Well, it's not complicated, really. And worth the small investment in time to learn.
On my Macs I use VMware Fusion. It's about $80 new. On my Linux and Windows boxes I use VMware Workstation Player, that's free for personal use.
The VMware guest VMs are portable between the above three operating system platforms, which is very handy.
On Linux I also use Xen as the host VM system. That's simpler and more Linux-like (command-line operation).
yeah, this kind of unwarranted link change unfortunately occurs too darn often; some publications are worse about it than others. looks like forbes flaked out today.
I am gobstruck. In more ways than one, mate. At the most, given the nature of your postings I would have guessed you at middle-to-late thirties at the most. I am a few years behind you (you will forgive Me if I do not state specifically how many, cough-cough) and am still attempting to grasp how someone so many years My senior still has the energy to post as you do.
S’Truth!
(Don’t let it go to your head though, old boy. :) _ )
Or, as the americans are fond of saying: peace, ya old fart! (in a laughingly teasing manner, of course! :) _ )
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