TechBlog

The building housing the Dutch company DigiNotar, which issues digital Web site certificates and was hacked last month. The New York Times: He claims to be 21 years old, a student of software engineering in Tehran who reveres Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and despises dissidents in his country. _“I’m totally independent,” he said in an e-mail exchange with The New York Times. “I just share my findings with some people in Iran. They are free to do anything they want with my findings and things I share with them, but I’m not responsible.” _He Said. ...

MSDN: One of the things we talk quite a bit about with Windows 8 is making sure Windows is a safe, secure, and reliable computing environment. We have always provided a broad range of solutions for achieving these goals and work closely with a broad range of industry partners. We continue to enhance these capabilities with Windows 8 while making sure you always have choice and control over how to protect and manage your PC. With Windows 8 we are extending the protections provided by Defender to address a broader range of potential threats. Jason Garms, the group program manager of our reliability and security team authored this post that represents work across several teams. –Steven ...

Happy birthday Avira FreeAV! Avira free antivirus solution protecting more than 100 million customers worldwide celebrates its 12th birthday today. Soon you can benefit from new version that is in the final stage of development. Stay tuned!

The H-Security: The online privacy and security service Tor was blocked by the Iranian government late evening (local time) 13 September. This was done by adding a filter rule to the Iranian border routers which identified Tor traffic and blocked it. The blocking was quickly discovered by Tor and the project released a fix a few hours later. The fix consists of a new version of the Tor software, Tor 0.2.3.4-alpha, and once this is installed on relays and bridges, the company expects normal service to be resumed for users in Iran. ...

The H-Security: The BitTorrent company has confirmed that its uTorrent servers were hacked on Tuesday 13 September and, for almost two hours, anyone downloading the uTorrent client software from the servers received a scareware fake anti-virus package instead. The malware package has been identified as belonging to the “Security Shield” family of scareware; once installed, it falsely informs a user that malware has been detected on their machine and requests payment in order to clean the system. ...

The H-Security: Adobe has released new versions of Reader and Acrobat to close several critical security holes. Versions 10.x, 9.x and 8.x of both products for Windows, Linux and Mac are affected. Adobe recommends that Reader X and Acrobat X users update to version 10.1.1 as this version offers added protection under Windows through its sandbox. However, the vendor has also made Adobe Reader 9.4.6 and 8.3.1, as well as Adobe Acrobat 9.4.6 and 8.3.1, available to download. Adobe Reader 9.4.6 for UNIX is due to be released on 7 November. ...

The H-Security: Microsoft has released two updates for Windows and three for Office to close various security holes. All five updates have only been rated “important” by the company. A hole in WINS enables local attackers to escalate their privileges on a system. Another patch prevents a new variant of binary planting, or DLL hijacking, attacks that can cause Windows to load DLLs from shared network volumes without the user’s permission. This allows attackers to execute code on a computer via specially crafted DLLs. Microsoft has been struggling to contain the insecure DLL loading problem with numerous patches released since mid 2010. ...

SophosLabs: Following the widely-publicised disgrace of Dutch digital certificate issuer DigiNotar, a person calling himself ComodoHacker claimed that he’d breached four other Certificate Authorities (CAs), too. Only one of these CAs was named: GlobalSign, the world’s fifth-biggest issuer of digital certificates. In my opinion, GlobalSign would have been justified in ignoring this claim altogether. It comes across as a stream of made-up, self-serving puffery, including bluster like this: You see? I’m so smart, sharp, dangerous, powerful, etc. huh? ...

Business Insider: A new poll in France says 7 out of 10 people think Microsoft did more to change the world than Apple. We think we would have similar results in other countries, if only because a lot more people (still!) use Microsoft products than Apple products, at least for personal computing which is (still!) the most important part of computing. It’s hard to see a mention of Steve Jobs without the worlds “change the world” or “changing an industry.” And let’s give him his due. Let’s give him his due as one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history, as an amazing entrepreneur and visionary who left many “dents” in the universe. And he did change many industries, like music, film, and yes, personal computing. ...

SophosLabs: Pop singer Pink has posted an angry message to hackers, who she claims stole photographs from her Facebook page. But was Pink’s Facebook page really hacked, or was she just one of the many people who have been careless with their privacy settings? The Grammy award-winning singer, famous for hit records such as “Get the party started” and “God is a DJ”, posted on Twitter about the incident, but didn’t clarify the nature of the photos the hackers might have accessed. ...