St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Posts Tagged ‘security’

Writing about the Coleman data leak is going to be tough to do without sounding like a paranoid extreme left winger or an extreme right winger. Let me assure I’ve alway been disappointed with both parties and I am a confirmed independent.

With that out of the way, lets get on with the paranoia:

The Main stream media is definitely reporting untruths about this story. They are saying that the data leak was the result of a hacker and that federal crime has been committed. This is entirely untrue. the only person that’s even saying this is Colemans attorney, well I’m sure some extreme supporters are saying this too.

What really happened.
The developers running colemans site asking for donations to his legal fund screwed up the site. It left the website down for an extended period of time.
While investigating Adria Richards stumbled across the websites database completley unsecured. she did this with a web browser and nothing else. This is not hacking. This is “surfing the internet”.

links:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19912.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=Adria+Richards&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://butyoureagirl.com/2009/01/28/did-norm-coleman-fake-his-own-website-death/

http://washingtonindependent.com/33674/norm-colemans-donor-database-exposed-campaign-claims-political-motives

Microsoft announced a big security hole in Microsoft Excel 2007.
(Update - the tech specs on this alert have broadened greatly, including almost all versions of MS Excel now)
There is also new info on this , I’ve add it to the bottom of this post.

If users download a malicious Excel file and open it, a Trojan Horse is installed on their computers which can allow the attacker who created the Excel file to completely take over the computer in question.

Most of the few remaining clients I have that haven’t went under yet use Excel on a daily basis and even send / receive them via e-mail or over a corporate network.

If this is you, please have your Network technicians promptly block e-mail delivery of all excel files via e-mail. I mean now. If one person on your corporate network receives one and opens it, it could quickly infect every computer on the network.

This is rapidly infecting corporate networks around the world.

There is NO patch for this as of yet.

Most anti-virus software won’t catch or do anything about this yet.

Microsoft probably will release something to fix this vulnerability in Excel, but it’ll be week in coming, not hours.

If you’re one of the smaller businesses and can’t get your network specialist to lock this down promptly, then call me and I’ll talk you through how to do it on your own.

Also tell your network technicians the symantec article on this subject is erroneous at the time of this writing.

Here’s a tech alert about this.

UPDATE:
The first trojan it installs is called:
Trojan.Mdropper.AC.
UPDATE 2
Not the old trojan with the same name from 2006 that effected MS Word.

03-01-2009:
Microsoft finally acknowledges it’s existence, but still doesn’t have a fix, here’s their tech bulletin.

We’ve learned the exploit won’t work on machines running Windows Vista.

Microsoft has also issued a “workaround”:

1 – Turn on MOICE. MOICE converts the XLS to XSLX before opening. Again, the new XML file format is not susceptible to this vulnerability.

2 – Turn on FileBlock. This option is a little more disruptive to most environments. With FileBlock enabled, Excel will only open the new XML-based file format that is safer. It will not open the legacy binary file format. If your organization has switched over to using the new file format exclusively, this might be a great option, even just long enough for us to get a security update out to address the vulnerability.

- Jonathan Ness and Bruce Dang, MSRC Engineering

So what is MOICE? It stands for “Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment.” It’s an update for MS Office. It’s hard to find, hard to use and converts your office files to MS Office’s “Open XML” format. what MS won’t tell you is that often destroys the file making it permanently unusable or only usable after an expert “fixes” all the info in it by hand.

I’ve got my own work around going:
Open it on a Vista Machine, convert the file to a simpler format, like .csv, and then send it back. This is only if your really need the file. If it’s a case of curiousity, as in I got this excel file in the e-mail and I don’t know what it is, then just don’t open it, the odds are it’s infected.

here’s more.