The Edge : web

Marketing with Microsoft adCenter

Essential Computer Security — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:45:04 GMT

If you have visited a web site recently, it is a virtual certainty that you have seen pay-per-click advertising links. Actually, you are here on my site reading this post, and I have pay-per-click advertising links, so it is an absolute certainty. Most...(read more)

Windows Integrity Control

tonybradley — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:56:00 GMT

With Vista, Microsoft introduced a new security concept to help protect your computer. Rather than relying on discretionary controls, like NTFS file and folder permissions which users can assign and change, Vista also has new mandatory controls. WIC, or Windows Integrity Control (also referred to as MIC, or Mandatory Integrity Control in some circles), assigns an integrity, or trustworthiness, level to each object and uses the integrity levels to control interactions between the objects. The integrity levels are assigned by the operating system and supercede, or override, the dicretionary permissions to protect the computer system. WIC is used throughout the system, but is arguably most noticeable in the Internet Explorer Protected Mode which protects the Vista operating system from malicious web content in Internet Explorer. For more details about WIC, check out this article I submitted to SecurityFocus: Introduction to Windows Integrity Control.

IE6 Vulnerable More Than 3/4 Of 2006

tonybradley — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 15:38:00 GMT

According to a study compiled by the Washington Post's Brian Krebs, Internet Explorer 6 was vulnerable for 284 out of 365 days in 2006. That amounts to over 77% of the year. What does that mean? It means the for 3/4 of the year there were known vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer 6 for which no patch existed.

Some were fairly serious zero-day exploits that were being actively exploited in the wild while users waited for an update from Microsoft. Others were less serious, but were still left vulnerable, mostly due to the nature of the monthly Security Bulletin and patch release schedule that Microsoft uses. A flaw that is discovered the day after "Patch Tuesday" will most likely remain unpatched for an entire month until the next "Patch Tuesday". By contrast, Krebs found that the Firefox browser was only vulnerable for 9 days, and IE7 was too new to have any substantial data for this year's survey.

The pro-Firefox, Microsoft-bashing crowd will jump all over this. You can see it in the comments on Krebs' article. I fall into the camp that believes that IE is targeted because of its market share as much as the quality of the code. Firefox or Opera may, in fact, be superior from a security standpoint, but neither is impervious and if they had 85% of the web browser market share we wouldn't be so hyper-focused on the weaknesses of Internet Explorer (and neither would the malware authors). Still, it doesn't paint a pretty picture and Microsoft should take notice and seek to rectify the issue for IE7 and for 2007. You can read Krebs' complete article here: Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006

Unpatched Flaw In Microsoft Word Being Exploited

tonybradley — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:27:00 GMT

A flaw in the way Microsoft Word 2000 documents are processed could allow an attacker to execute malicious code remotely on vulnerable systems according to a Secunia alert. Exploit code has been identified in the wild and no patch is currently available, so Secunia has rated the Advisory as Extremely Critical and advises users not to open any untrusted Microsoft Office files. For more information, you can check out the details of the Advisory here: Secunia Advisories - September 5, 2006.