security Archives

Silent update of IE from January 2012

Finally, Micro$oft knows how to do a silent update for your IE browser. Maybe just learned from Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

Anyway, this is a smart move to stop or at least to slow down the loss of market share (to Chrome and Firefox). M$ won the browser war against Netscape by bundling IE to Windows since Windows 95. But is has been a loser in the same battlefield against Firefox, nor against Chrome.

Security, speed, and W3C standard are the major reasons tech geeks abandon IE. IE 8 and IE 9 did have some improvement in security and speed. But the compliance with standards is still not as good as Chrome or Firefox.

So, M$ silently updates the IE browser for most users; a lot of users will not know because they already switched to other better browsers.… Read the rest

Carrier IQ, another spyware purposely loaded by greedy carriers

Daily digest, Safe Surfing Guide

According to TechCrunch, Carrier IQ is a “mobile intelligence” firm that provides logging software for carriers and devices OEMs for use in their devices. Carrier IQ claims that they deliver information “on the performance of mobile devices and networks to help the Operators provide optimal service efficiency,” but Android security researcher Trevor Eckhart discovered that CarrierIQ was capable of tracking data that’s more fine-grained than what would be expected for simple diagnostic feedback.

The Carrier IQ website claims that the program has been installed on more than 140 million devices. If you are using Sprint+Samsung or Sprint+HTC, you should check your phone today.

Are you one of the victims?… Read the rest

Firefox 8 cracks third-party add-ons

Daily digest, Safe Surfing Guide

Everyday millions of third-party add-ons are installed for Firefox. Some of them can impose serious privacy and security holes for the computer.

Finally, in the latest release, Firefox 8 disables third-party add-ons. This is a correct step among so many mistakes in recent releases.

According to the official Mozilla Add-ons Blog:

These add-ons installed by third parties present a number of problems: they can slow down Firefox start-up and page loading time, they clutter the interface with toolbars that often go unused, they lag behind on compatibility and security updates, and most importantly, they take the user out of control of their add-ons.

So, in Firefox 8, users must opt-in to add-on installation. This means Firefox will disable the add-on until the user has explicitly opted into the addition.

Anyway, this is a positive move. What do you think about this?… Read the rest

How to surf safely? use webmail

Daily digest, Safe Surfing Guide

This is part 3 of the Safe Surfing Guide series. You may check other parts as well to read the complete safe surfing guide.

Malicious code and malicious link can be easily hidden in emails. When you open emails, the execution of the malicious code may be triggered. Or, the malicious link may open automatically and download nasty things to your local computer.

Another security issue for your email is phishing. The sender pretends to be someone else, e.g., Facebook, or your banker. If you follow the link, you are trapped.

If you follow this Safe Surfing Guide series, you may wonder how this can happen after your install antivirus and anti-malware software already. The reason is simple.

All antivirus and anti-malware software can only find “known” threats, although some software can use certain patterns to find new threats. Most of the time, only after the virus … Read the rest