Today, Microsoft released four patches for various software programs including their Windows Live Messenger and Visual Studio. One of the patches was designed for their operating system.

The flaw in Windows Live Messenger is about its webcam functionality. Those who were tricked into accepting an invitation for a webcam or video chat may have lost control of their PCs to the attacker who sent the invitation.

“This is the most important one. It falls into this new trend of new media attacks using social engineering. By ‘new media,’ I mean exploits inside images, inside MP3 files and, in this case, inside [a] webcam session,” said Amol Sarwate of Qualys’ vulnerability lab.

Source: PC World

A new Windows worm is circulating on the net which involves the chat program called Skype.

The process is that there will be a chat message from a user’s friend which will ask them to click a link which looks like it is pointing to a JPEG image. However, the link actually points to a virus.

If a user clicks on the link, Windows will ask the user permission if the user will allow it to run a screen saver file. If the user said yes, then the Skipi, Pykspa, or Ramex virus will try to disable the PC’s access to security-related websites by changing the hosts file, and it wil also install another piece of malware which steals data.

There is a method of how to remove the worm if a user was fooled into clicking the link.

Source: Tech Spot

I mean really sell, not just take down orders or fix computers. If you are going to spend lots of money on stock, advertising, branding or even having a shop front to bring customers though the door, whats the point if your staff doesn’t sell to them?
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We at Technibble are excited to launch our new product “The Computer Business Kit”.

The Computer Business Kit is a collection of forms and contracts that are needed in the computer business. It includes maintenance contracts, work orders, backup checklists, invoice samples, engagement form, marketing analysis form and much more.

Click here for a full list and to view some samples.

Microsoft has decided not to release a patch for its SharePoint collaboration software. It was scheduled to be released this month and the company did not give further comments why they made this decision close to its release date nor when they are planning to release the patch in the future.

The flaw was rated as “important” by Microsoft’s rating scale. It affects SharePoint Services 3.0 on two different server products. The products are Windows Server 2003 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

McAfee Inc. said that this delay may give attackers more time to exploit the known SharePoint vulnerability.

Source: PC World

A new version of Apple iTunes is now available for both Windows and Mac OS X users. The new version is 7.4 and it includes an important security update according to the article at washingtonpost.com

Mac users can update their iTunes software by clicking on the Apple logo on the top left hand corner of their computer and then pressing on the Software Update menu.

For Windows users, they can acquire the new version by downloading it from Apple’s website.

The security update is about a buffer overflow when processing an album cover art.

Source: Washingtonpost.com

There are five upcoming patches for Windows and they are expected to be released next week.

One of the patches is rated as critical and the rest are rated as ‘important’.

The critical patch is designed for the operating system. The four important patches are designed for Visual Studio, SFU which stands for Services For Linux, MSN / Live Messenger, and SharePoint Server / Windows.

There will also be updated Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Source: The Register

When you first start out with your computer business, you may think that any client that comes along is a good client. Money is money right? Especially when you’ve just quit your 9 to 5 job to become a freelancer. Perhaps you are keeping busy in the beginning because you are the only business in your small town selling cheap computers? When you first started out your markup was only $100 per computer so you can establish a good client base and it seemed to work for a good year or so. However, the college student working out of his dormitory has decided to start is own computer business in your area. Worse still, because his overheads a relatively low working out of his bedroom his markup for new computers is only $50. Many customers in your small town pounce on this offer and your business starts to slow down. What are you going to do?
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A new worm has been detected by Sophos recently and they reported it on their blog.

They detected the worm as W32/DelCyc-A. It hides in a recycled folder which is created on a removable USB flash drive that it had affected.

This worm executes automatically when the drive is connected to another machine.

For those who understand computers more than the average person, they can tell what the worm is doing based on a screen shot which is shown on the blog. It uses an old autorun.inf trick according to the study by Sophos.

Source: Sophos

Sophos has posted a new article a few days ago on their blog about a malware that is related to Labor Day which occurred last Monday on North America.

The titles in the subject lines include “Happy Labor Day”, The Big Labor Day Weekend”, and “A Labor Day E-Card”.

The emails contain links that look legitimate and includes trusted websites such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Some of the links are:
http://msn.com/funny/laborday?
http://yahoo.com/07greetings/laborg?
http://google.com/funcard/hol07?

However, the links actually point to compromised computers. If a user clicked on any of the links, he or she will see a webpage with a picture that shows two men who are constructing a Happy Labor Day banner.

Source: Sophos