Computer Internet network security News

Phishing emails are being used by the hackers to obtain data of the email users. The emails which they target is not on specific peoples. They just send emails in bundle to different email addresses and waitfor the peoples who do mistake of clicking the phishing link becomes victim and their personal data fall in the hands of phishers who use this to hack their personal accounts etc.

It’s good news for all PayPal and Ebay customers. You don’t have to worry about phishing mails if you have a Gmail account. Phishing mails are a kind of spam mails that try to deceive the account holder to gain access to their valuable account information like password . Although, Google already have spam filters in place in their Gmail servers, many spam mails still come through these spam filters. Now onwards, Any mail coming from PayPal or Ebay will be delivered to customers inboxes only if they are digitally signed using DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) tools. They won’t even go to spam folder.

I think its a good move by gmail to secure the email users. Now the user can feel confidence on gmail services as this type of effort had been taken by yahoo long time ago.

Phishing email-security, phishers, spam mails, spammers

 Matt Cutt is a well know google engineer. He gave recently security tips on wordpress. Wordpress security is always a concern for bloggers who using this platform. The following tips can be helpful for bloggers to get secure from hackers.

1. Drop version string in header.php
The tag in your header.php that displays your current version of wordpress.
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" />

Since everyone knows your wordpress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers if you have not upgraded to the new version.
Hide your wordpress version by deleting it or simply changing it to
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress" />

2. Put a blank index.html in /plugins/ directory.
In a normal wordpress installation, anyone can access your Wordpress plugin folder to see which plugins you have installed. The path is
http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/

Try it for your blog and your entire directory structure is revealed. Just create a blank file in notepad and name it index.html and drop it in your plugins folder and the folder details will no longer be visible to the public and prevent hackers from cracking a plugin security hole.

3. Put .htaccess in /wp-admin/
He points to this article of Protecting the Wordpress wp-admin folder. This will limit access to this folder by IP address and attempts at accessing any file within this folder will be greeted with a Forbidden error message.

The above tips does not gurantee the security of your blog but it may help for small hackers not to invade in your wordpress files. For complete wordpress security one should update the wordpress regularly as wordpress is an open source platform so vulnerabilities is an issue which will continue as it develops more.

Blogging security open source platform, wordpress, wordpress-security

Safe mode helps you diagnose problems. If a symptom does not reappear when you start in safe mode, you can eliminate the default settings and minimum device drivers as possible causes. If a newly added device or a changed driver is causing problems, you can use safe mode to remove the device or reverse the change.

There are circumstances where safe mode will not be able to help you, such as when Windows system files that are required to start the system are corrupted or damaged. In this case, the Recovery Console may help you.

Safe Mode also bypasses startup programs. Bypassing startup programs reduces system complexity and enables you to see whether a startup program is the source of the problem.

In safe mode, the operating system does not run network-based startup programs. To enable network logon scripts in safe mode, select Safe Mode with Networking on the Windows Advanced Options Menu.

To start your computer in safe mode:

1.       Remove all floppy disks and CDs from your computer, and then restart your computer.

2.       When prompted, press F8. If Windows XP Professional starts without displaying the Please select the operating system to start menu, restart your computer. Press F8 after the firmware POST process completes, but before Windows displays graphical output.

3.       From the Windows Advanced Options Menu, select a safe mode option listed in the following list:

(Windows 2000 Boot menu screenshot)

Safe Mode: Loads the minimum set of device drivers and system services required to start Windows XP/2000/2003. User specific startup programs do not run.

Safe Mode with Networking: Includes the services and drivers needed for network connectivity. Safe mode with networking enables logging on to the network, logon scripts, security, and Group Policy settings. Nonessential services and startup programs not related to networking do not run.

Safe Mode with Command Prompt: Starts the computer in safe mode, but displays the command prompt rather than the Windows GUI interface.

Enable Boot Logging: Creates a log file (Ntbtlog.txt) in the system root folder, which contains the file names and status of all drivers loaded into memory. System root is an environment variable that can vary from one system running Windows XP/2000/2003 to another.

Enable VGA Mode: Starts the computer in standard VGA mode by using the current video driver. This option helps you recover from distorted video displays caused by using incorrect settings for the display adapter or monitor.

Last Known Good Configuration: Restores the registry and driver configuration in use the last time the computer started successfully.

Debugging Mode: Starts Windows XP/2000/2003 in kernel debugging mode, which allows you to use a kernel debugger for troubleshooting and system analysis.

Start Windows Normally: Starts Windows XP/2000/2003 in normal mode.

Reboot: Restart the computer.

Computer-security command prompt, safe mode, startup program, windows system files

All encryption solutions which work thru an encrypted drive with drive letter have on thing in common: Administrator privileges are required, at least once to install the ecryption software. This is a problem on foreign computers.
When a guest wants to install his encryption software, he must been trusted unconditional because he is granted to execute his software with administrator privileges. But no one can be sure what this software does despite the encrytion job. The computer is just compromised then!
Even an antivirus software is useless because the foreign software is executed with admin privileges an the user will grant all requests to make it work.NTFS encryption is no help too because dealing with certificates is no fun and they are not compatible between Windows 2000 and XP.

Solution: The approved open source software TrueCrypt: http://www.truecrypt.org
It requires admin previlegs too but only once for installation. And the admin can download the software itself and validate its integrity by checking its PGP signature.

Using TrueCrypt is documented on countless pages in the internet, just enter TrueCrypt at your preferred search engine.

Encryption encryption solutions, usb

This security update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in Outlook Web Access (OWA) for Microsoft Exchange Server. An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could gain access to an individual OWA client’s session data, allowing elevation of privilege. The attacker could then perform any action the user could perform from within the individual client’s OWA session.

This security update is rated Important for all supported editions of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.

The security update addresses the vulnerabilities by modifying the validation of HTTP session data within OWA. For more information about the vulnerabilities, see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) subsection for the specific vulnerability entry under the next section, Vulnerability Information.

Recommendation.  Microsoft recommends that customers apply the update at the earliest opportunity.

Known Issues.  Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 953747 documents the currently known issues that customers may experience when installing this security update.

Microsoft security microsoft exchange server, microsoft knowledge base, outlook web access, validation, vulnerability

The Domain Name System (DNS) is responsible for translating host names to IP addresses (and vice versa) and is critical for the normal operation of internet-connected systems. DNS cache poisoning (sometimes referred to as cache pollution) is an attack technique that allows an attacker to introduce forged DNS information into the cache of a caching nameserver. DNS cache poisoning is not a new concept; in fact, there are published articles that describe a number of inherent deficiencies in the DNS protocol and defects in common DNS implementations that facilitate DNS cache poisoning. The following are examples of these deficiencies and defects:

• Insufficient transaction ID space
  The DNS protocol specification includes a transaction ID field of 16 bits. If the specification is correctly implemented and the transaction ID is randomly selected with a strong random number generator, an attacker will require, on average, 32,768 attempts to successfully predict the ID. Some flawed implementations may use a smaller number of bits for this transaction ID, meaning that fewer attempts will be needed. Furthermore, there are known errors with the randomness of transaction IDs that are generated by a number of implementations. Amit Klein researched several affected implementations in 2007. These vulnerabilities are described in the following vulnerability notes

More at http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/800113

Internet security dns protocol, domain name system, protocol specification, Vulnerabilities