Monday, April 9, 2007

Daily Highlights

The Press Herald reports that 117,000 customers in Maine were affected last week by a power outage caused by snow. (See item 1)
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The New York Times reports that more 911 calls come from cell phones than land lines, but 40 percent of the nation’s counties cannot yet pinpoint the location of cell phone callers. (See item 29)


Information Technology and Telecommunications Sector

30. April 06, IDG News Service — Motherboard maker's Website hacked. The Website for computer parts manufacturer ASUStek Computer Inc. has been hacked and has been serving up attack code that exploited a critical Windows vulnerability, patched earlier last week. The exploit is hidden in an HTML element on the front page of ASUStek's Taiwanese Website, which then attempts to download the code from another server, according to Roger Thompson of Exploit Prevention Labs Inc. As of Friday, April 6, the server that downloaded the attack code was not operational, mitigating the risk of this attack, although attackers could easily redirect their attacks to a live server, he said. The malware is of particular concern because it exploits a critical flaw, patched just this past week, in the way Windows processes .ani animated cursor files. Reliable exploit code that targets this flaw has been circulating for more than a week now, and users who visit the ASUStek Web site before installing the MS07−017 patch could have their PCs compromised.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9015904&intsrc=hm_list