Archive for 'Windows security' Category
Windows gets a real shell
Microsoft operating systems have taken another small step towards adulthood now that PowerShell has been released. This is the first real scriptable shell MS has produced for their operating systems. Now we have a vendor approved way to automate system administration, somewhat comparable to Bash and other scriptable shells that have long made Unix and Linux systems [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Free host intrusion prevention for Windows
"Host intrusion prevention" (HIP) software tries to stop malicious software either either recognizing patterns of malicious activity, or by blocking access to critical system areas. When properly implemented, HIP very effective at stopping new ("zero day") attacks that anti-virus (AV) software is largely incapable of preventing. People seem to have a hard time understanding the [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Application whitelisting
The folks at Dark Reading have a fun article about the revival of application whitelisting. As the article points out the concept of enforcing a list of what applications can run on a workstation is nothing new, but some recent products have appeared that are pushing the concept once again. Controlling what code can run [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Free anti-phishing and trust toolbars
As a follow-up to my previous post about trust certification services, there are several real-time tools you can install in your browser to get a third party opinion about how trustworthy the site is. These tools install in Firefox, Mozilla and sometimes other browsers and query a remote database in real-time for each URL you [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Disarming Adobe PDF Viewer
Security researcher David Kierznowski has found a few flaws in the Adobe PDF viewer and Acrobat PDF creator. Using the built-in Javascript he was able to construct PDFs that can force MS internet Explorer to open a malicious URL without warning, and to perform reconnaissance of local settings like ODBC connections. We wrote about problems [...]
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