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A malicious script that spies on Apple Mac users was discovered over the weekend. The malware, which has been dubbed ‘Opener’ by Mac user-groups, disables Mac OS X’s built-in firewall, steals personal information and can destroy data. Security experts say these traits are common among the thousands of viruses targeting Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system but are virtually unheard of amongst the Apple Macintosh community. Paul Ducklin, Sophos’ head of technology in the Asia Pacific, told ZDNet Australia that the malware, which Sophos calls Renepo, is designed to infect any Mac OS X drives connected to the infected system and...

24 June 2004Mac OS X security myth exposedAnd thousands of other products and OSes given security rundown. By Matthew Broersma, Techworld Windows is more secure than you think, and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined. That is according to statistics published for the first time this week by Danish security firm Secunia. The stats, based on a database of security advisories for more than 3,500 products during 2003 and 2004 sheds light on the real security of enterprise applications and operating systems, according to the firm. Each product is broken down into pie charts demonstrating how...

Solid reputation paints bull's-eye on Mozilla's Firefox Free Web browser is known to be virtually impregnable to viruses and pop-ups, but it isn't hack-proof Sarah Stables CanWest News Service Thursday, January 06, 2005 A reputation for being virtually impregnable to viruses, pop-ups and other nasties of the Web is driving millions of fed-up computer users to ditch Internet Explorer in favour of the supposedly hack-proof alternative, Firefox, Mozilla's free Web browser. There's only one problem: the upstart isn't hack-proof at all. The evidence is at K-Otic.com, a Web site where hackers and security experts post their latest "exploits" - coded...

Court upholds Microsoft-DOJ settlement Last modified: June 30, 2004, 12:55 PM PDT By Ina Fried Staff Writer, CNET News.com A U.S. Appeals Court on Wednesday upheld Microsoft's landmark antitrust settlement with the Department of Justice and several state attorneys general, rejecting Massachusetts' appeal for stiffer penalties. "The order approving the consent decree in the public interest is affirmed," the appeals court wrote in an 83-page ruling that preserves the settlement and dismisses the objections of Massachusetts--the lone holdout state--and two industry trade groups. The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is another...

Apple QuickTime contains an integer overflow in the "QuickTime.qts" extension Overview Apple QuickTime contains an integer overflow vulnerability in the "QuickTime.qts" extension, which could result in arbitrary code execution. I. Description Apple's QuickTime Player is a player that allow users to view local and remote audio/video content. Other applications, such as web browsers, that wish to utilize QuickTime functionality must use the QuickTime extension (QuickTime.qts) component. This component contains an integer overflow vulnerability in the routine responsible for copying Sample-to-Chunk table entries into an array. According to the QuickTime File Format specification, a Sample-to-Chunk atom contains a 4-byte "number of...

Study says 100 million PCs to be replaced in 2004 By Dinesh C. Sharma CNET News.com May 20, 2004, 12:18 PM PT Nearly 100 million PCs are likely to be replaced this year, with 120 million being swapped out in 2005, according to data research firm Gartner released Thursday. The volume of replacements in the next two years will surpass the number of units replaced in the run-up to Y2K in 1998 and 1999, Gartner said. In 2004, replacement units will drive global shipments to 186.4 million--an increase of 13.6 percent over 2003. "Our first-quarter results suggest the...replacement cycle that...

Student hacks iTunes for compatibility By Patrick Gray, SecurityFocus May 4 2004 3:31PM According to the Australian researcher who cracked the authentication used by Apple's iTunes software, current-generation Digital Rights Management (DRM) will never work. David Hammerton, a 20-year-old Arts-Science student, reverse-engineered iTunes' authentication measures last week, allowing non-iTunes clients to connect to Apple's servers. It was the second time he had managed to crack the authentication, however this time it took him just eight hours to break the brand-new iTunes 4.5, which had been patched against his previous research. "The first time it took me a week to do...

Flaws drill holes in open-source repository Last modified: May 19, 2004, 1:42 PM PDT By Robert Lemos Staff Writer, CNET News.com Flaws in two popular source code repository applications could allow attackers to access and corrupt open-source software projects, a security researcher said Wednesday. One vulnerability affects the Concurrent Versions System (CVS), an application used by many developers to store program code. The other flaw affects a newer, less widely used system known as Subversion, said Stefan Esser, the researcher who discovered the security holes. The CVS software, in particular, is run by many large open-source projects to create servers...

Linux Kernel e1000 Ethernet Card Driver Buffer Overflow Vulnerability Reportedly the Linux kernel e1000 Ethernet card driver is affected by a buffer overflow vulnerability. This issue is due to a failure of the application to validate user input lengths before processing them. This issue might allow an attacker to corrupt kernel memory space. It might be possible to leverage this issue to execute arbitrary code on the affected system, although this has not been verified. bugtraq id 10352 object class Boundary Condition Error cve CVE-MAP-NOMATCH remote Unknown local Yes published May 14, 2004 updated May 14, 2004 vulnerable Linux kernel...

Group seeks to invalidate Microsoft patent By Ina Fried CNET News.com April 16, 2004, 12:58 PM PT A little-known public interest group this week asked the U.S. government to revoke a Microsoft patent that covers the company's Windows file system. The Public Patent Foundation on Thursday asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to revoke one of Microsoft's patents related to the FAT (File Allocation Table) file system, the older of two main systems used by Windows to store files. "We are concerned that there is a potential for Microsoft to use its patent portfolio to foreclose competition from free...

Microsoft offers charity-friendly license Groups will legally be able to use donated, refurbished PCsBy Munir Kotadia Updated: 2:20 p.m. ET April 09, 2004Microsoft has created a special software license for Windows 98 and Windows 2000 that allows charities and schools to use second-hand PCs without breaking the company's end-user license rules. As pressure increases on businesses to recycle or refurbish their old PCs, a greater number of used systems are finding their way into the hands of charitable organizations and schools. The catch is that, because the computers were sold with corporate licenses, it is effectively illegal for the charities...

Moving to Linux may not save money--yet Last modified: April 5, 2004, 9:45 AM PDT By Matt Hines Staff Writer, CNET News.com Migrating to open-source software may cost some companies more than simply upgrading their Unix or Windows systems, according to a study research company The Yankee Group released Monday. Based on a survey of 1,000 information technology administrators and corporate executives at companies around the globe, Yankee's report concluded that the technical merits promised by Linux and applications built to run on the operating system have yet to overcome financial concerns related to adopting the software. At companies with...

Netcraft: ASP.NET Overtakes JSP and Java Servlets In this month's Web Server Survey the number of IP addresses with sites using ASP.NET has overtaken those using JSP and Java Servlets. The number of IP addresses found with ASP.NET has shown very strong growth in the past year with a 224% increase from 17.2K to 55.8K. JSP & Java Servlets despite being overtaken is the next fastest growing in percentage terms with a 56% increase. In the Fortune 1000 83 companies use ASP.NET on one or more of their sites. We found Tenet Healthcare having at least 88 sites which utilise...

Bush2000 to Try Being Nice for One Week It's an experiment. What the Hell...

Feds reject Eolas browser patent Last modified: March 5, 2004, 3:48 PM PST By Reuters The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated a claim to Web browser technology central to a case against Microsoft, a move that could spare the software giant from paying more than half a billion dollars in damages, according to documents obtained on Friday. The patent agency's preliminary decision, if upheld, also means that Microsoft will not be required to make changes to its Internet Explorer Web browser that would have crippled the program's ability to work with mini-programs that work over the Internet, such...

SCO to sue Linux user Tuesday Last modified: March 1, 2004, 4:35 PM PST By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com SAN FRANCISCO--The SCO Group plans to expand its Linux legal attack on Tuesday by filing a lawsuit against a large company using the open-source operating system. SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride announced the plan Monday at the Software 2004 conference here, but he didn't identify the company beyond saying it would have a recognized name. SCO, which owns a disputed amount of Unix intellectual property and claims some of the code was improperly used in Linux, threatened in November...

Microsoft on every DVD? By Ed Frauenheim and Stefanie Olsen CNET News.com February 27, 2004, 4:00 PM PT An industry standards group has made a preliminary decision to include Microsoft's video compression technology in a next-generation DVD format, giving the company a key boost in the digital media arena. The steering committee for the DVD Forum on Friday announced provisional approval for Microsoft's VC-9 and two other video technologies--H.264 and MPEG-2--as mandatory for the HD-DVD video specification for playback devices. VC-9 is the reference title for the underlying video decoding technology within Windows Media Video 9. The approval is subject...

Judge accepts expanded SCO lawsuit By Stephen Shankland CNET News.com February 27, 2004, 5:42 PM PT A judge has accepted the SCO Group's changes to a lawsuit against IBM that now seeks $5 billion in damages for Big Blue's alleged moving of Unix intellectual property into Linux. Because IBM didn't oppose SCO's motion to amend its claims--a motion that was "subject to IBM's right to move against the amended pleadings"--Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells accepted SCO's new legal attack, he said in a filing Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Utah. The second amended complaint drops SCO's claim that IBM...

Scaling up and out on WindowsInformation Week Feb 17, 2004 by jpfoley Remember Scalability Day? It was May 20, 1997 in New York and it was intended, via an elaborate demonstration at the Sheraton Hotel, to show that Windows had become a bonafide scale-up operating system, capable of handling a billion transactions a day and more. But the carefully configured mega systems on display that day, assembled with all the internal know-how available to Microsoft and its hardware partners, were unusual if not impossible to find in real-world data centers. Now, we're beginning to hear about super-size Windows systems that...

Microsoft has applied for patents that could prevent competing applications from reading documents created with the latest version of the software giant's Office program. The company filed similar patent applications in New Zealand and the European Union that cover word processing documents stored in the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format. The proposed patent would cover methods for an application other than the original word processor to access data in the document. The U.S. Patent Office had no record of a similar application. Microsoft representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment. XML-based capabilities have been one of the main...