MessageLabs has reported that they have intercepted emails that contain virus links within spam messages. According to The Register’s article, it is the first time that MessageLabs has seen malicious links that are hidden in a spam message.

“Why use two emails when just one will do? Now we are seeing the bad guys layer on the threats – as if it’s not enough to just scam someone and fill their inbox with junk email, why not also infect and take control of their computer at the same time. HTTP has replaced SMTP [email] as the path of least resistance,” said Mark Sunner who is the chief security analyst at MessageLabs.

The article also states that infected Microsoft Powerpoint files are becoming as common as infected Microsoft Word files.

Source: The Register

A person who is very knowledgeable on the technical aspects of Microsoft operating systems said that the security expectations for Vista should be lower.

He spoke in the CanSecWest conference last week where he made predictions about the future of malware and anti-malware. He noted that malicious people will create negative softwares such as viruses, password-stealing Trojans, and rootkits.

One of his predictions is that malware would eventually find ways on compromising applications to elevate its privileges.

His talk was suppose to give professionals that the implementation of User Account Control is not a security boundary. Instead, it will just stop malware from changing settings in an operating system.

Source: VISTA.BLORGE.com

If you’ve been following the series of articles about employing your next shining star, and making sure you do all the up-front stuff properly, you’ll be equipped with a go getting, enthusiastic bundle of joy awaiting your instruction and watching your every move. This is what you do with them next – teach them to be as good as, and then better than you!
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The beta version of Microsoft’s latest server operating system has been released for beta testing to the public.

Bill Laing who works for the Windows Server Division said “As they take it for a test drive, our customers and partners will find we made some vast improvements in Windows Server ‘Longhorn’ to help them reduce costs and adapt to changing business needs. Between early adopter customers and Microsoft IT, we have hundreds of servers running in production environments today. If there’s one message we want to send today, it is get ready, download and evaluate.”

Microsoft also added that this product is on track on its release date in the second half of this year.

Source: TechWhack

When the “Hack a Mac” contest was held a few days ago, it revealed a flaw on Apple’s Safari internet browser. Now, Networkworld.com has made a report that the flaw also affects Mozilla’s Firefox on Windows operating systems and for Apple OS X operating system.

An article at mac.blorge.com says that this exploit is almost as serious as the ANI (animated cursor) bug for Windows. Although Microsoft has released a patch for this bug, it is still unstable on some computer systems.

The Quicktime Media Player along with Java programming are the two main components of the flaw.

Source: MAC.BLORGE.com

A rumor has spread in the internet that DirectX 10 can run on a different operating system other than Windows Vista.

A guy named Cody Brocious who lives in San Diego has announced that he started on creating a wrapper for executable files such as .exe files which were intended to run on Windows operating systems. He said that he reverse-engineered a code and that games that are developed specifically for Windows may play on Mac OS X operating systems, which uses Intel processors, and Linux.

On a different note, a project called the Alky Project were able to make wrappers which makes DirectX 10 run on DX10 hardware with Windows XP.

Source: The INQUIRER

Double Driver is a tool for collecting the drivers that the computer uses to communicate with its hardware. One of the main reasons why you would want to collect an computers drivers is if you don’t have the Driver CD that came with the computer or they are unavailable online. This is a very common task by computer technicians about to format a computer. In the past we have mentioned Driver Collector as a tool to backup drivers which it does well. However, one of our valued forum members named Techpro mentioned that Double Driver collects all the drivers in one go rather than having to do them one by one with Driver Collector.
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The default internet browser of Apple computers called “Safari”, has been hacked successfully by a person named Dino Dai Zovi in a contest called “pwn-2-own”.

With this result, he won a 2.3 Ghz Macbook Pro which comes with a 15″ screen and $10,000 cash.

Zovi is a New York-based security researcher and it only took him less than 12 hours to figure out a zero-day vulnerability that could possibly exists in Safari.

On the first day of the contest, the attendees of the contest were underwhelmed so the content organizers revised the rules a little bit in favor of the attendees.

Source: The Register

Formatting computers is a task that busy computer technicians have to do almost daily and it isn’t as easy as slipping the XP disk into the computer and pressing setup. Clients will want to keep their emails, documents and other settings. In this guide, we’ll show you how to format a computer like a computer technician.
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Earthtimes.org has posted an article that the German Federal Agency for Security in Information Technology advises users to update their computers to plug the new security holes that has recently been discovered.

One of the bugs is that a website administrator can take full control of a user’s computer if that user visited a malicious website. Two of the vulnerabilities can be attacked by denial-of-service attacks which paralyses a server.

The updates can be installed by either visiting the official Windows update site at http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com or through the Automatic Update feature that the Windows operating systems have. The article does not mention which Windows versions are affected.

Source: EARTHtimes.org