Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Daily Highlights

The Chicago Tribune reports that Chicago Public Schools will pay for credit protection for 40,000 current and former employees whose personal information was either stolen or released accidentally. (See item 9)

Information Technology and Telecommunications Sector

27. April 09, IDG News Service — Google fixes security hole in Chinese software tool. Google has closed a security hole in a recently released Chinese−input software tool that lies at the heart of a dispute with Chinese Internet company Sohu.com. "We had found this problem and have solved it during the product upgrade on Friday" wrote Google spokeperson Cui Jin. On Friday, April 6, Chinese security company Rising Co. said Google's Pinyin Input Method Editor presented a serious security threat to Microsoft Windows Vista users. The company warned users not to download and install the software, which lets users type Chinese characters by entering their Pinyin romanization equivalents, saying hackers could exploit a flaw to take control of a user's computers. Rising said Microsoft also bears responsibility for the vulnerability, noting that software released by other companies could recreate the same vulnerability.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070409/tc_infoworld/87512;_ylt=AoUOlBWVp8byK3y_OSfpi_ojtBAF

28. April 09, ComputerWorld — More problems pop up with Microsoft's ANI patch. Microsoft Corp. has acknowledged several new problems with the emergency patch it released last week to quash the Windows animated cursor file (ANI) bug and has updated a hotfix that it's telling some Windows XP SP2 users to download and install. The first problem with the MS07−017 update, the series of seven patches released last Tuesday, April 3, that among other things fixed the ANI flaw, was known to Microsoft before it posted the security bulletin. In fact, a hotfix to correct a flaw in the Realtek HD Audio Control Panel was published simultaneously with MS07−017. A glance at the Microsoft support forums that day and the next, however, showed that many Realtek users were unaware of the hotfix and were frustrated by the error messages they saw after installing the security update. Last Friday, Microsoft refreshed the hotfix to include three more third−party applications that won't start and may throw up an error message that states, "The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly." The applications are ElsterFormular, a German value−added tax calculator; TUGZip, a free compression utility; and CD−Tag, a $19 CD ripper.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9015923&intsrc=hm_list

29. April 06, eWeek — NAC attack: Today's products will fail, report says. Forrester Research analysts are urging corporations to prepare for a shift in the Network Access Control (NAC) market in the years to come, as NAC vendors move toward new software−based tools that leverage endpoint technology to proactively manage risk. In a report titled "Client Management 2.0," Forrester analysts Natalie Lambert and Robert Whiteley forecast the death of modern NAC products, which they say feature too much complexity and not enough interoperability. Operations management teams want a unified solution, Lambert said. The report also contends that many NAC products focus solely on compliance with security policies instead of the remediation problematic machines, and are not able to defend against newly emerging threats. In addition, the researchers stated that existing NAC systems often result in multiple policies being established to control the same processes.
Source: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2112120,00.asp

30. April 06, MacNewsWorld — Security researchers create iPod virus. It was only a matter of time before someone developed a proof−of−concept virus aimed at the iPod. Discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the virus is a file that can be launched and run on an iPod. The good news for the majority of iPod users is that Linux must be installed on the device for the virus to function; iPods running Linux are a decidedly smaller subset. If the virus, dubbed "Podloso," should manage to latch onto such an iPod, it would install itself in the folder that contains the program demo versions. Once launched, according to Kaspersky Lab, the virus scans the device's hard disk and infects all executable .elf format files. When the user tries to access these files, a message is displayed on the screen that says, "You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus." Podloso is a typical proof−of−concept virus, according to Kaspersky, created in order to show that it is possible to infect a specific platform. Like most of the ballyhooed mobile phone viruses, Podloso is unable to spread.
Source: http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/E5SKyrF5GUatOL/iPod−Proof−of−Concept−Virus−No−Teeth−No−Legs.xhtml