Free Republic

Beware That WinAmp Skin By Ryan Naraine August 26, 2004 The popular skinning feature in Nullsoft's WinAmp media player has left the door wide open for malicious attackers to hijack PCs. Security researchers at K-Otik discovered the vulnerability and released details of a "Skinhead" zero-day exploit that is already spreading in the wild. The exploit, which targets WinAmp versions 3.x and 5.x, is being used to forcefully install spyware and Trojans on infected systems. Secunia has tagged the flaw as "extremely critical," its highest rating. WinAmp skins have a huge following because they allow users to adopt colorful, customizable...

Computer security specialist Symantec Thursday moved swiftly to patch for four very serious vulnerabilities in its popular Norton firewall product suite. An alert from Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec described the flaws as "high risk" and warned that a successful exploit could wipe out a user's computer. Attackers could also execute remote code with kernel-level privileges on the targeted system. The vulnerabilities, first discovered by researchers at eEye Digital Security, affect both enterprise and consumer Norton users. Affected products include the Symantec Client Firewall 5.01 and 5.1.1; the Symantec Client Security 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 (SCF 7.1); the Norton Internet Security and Professional...

Microsoft confirmed it intends to add pop-up blocking to Internet Explorer as part of its Service Pack 2 release, due the first half of 2004. Meanwhile, agencies, advertisers and publishers suggest they'll be ready to kiss the ad units goodbye -- when the time comes. An important question that remains unanswered is whether IE pop-up blocking will be turned on by default. Microsoft said only that it plans to include the feature, and will gather user feedback before announcing further details. "If they turn it on by default, that would effectively kill pop-up advertising on the Web," said Nate Elliott,...