MSRC - Security Advisory 981374 Released

Does not affect IE8 or Windows 7.

Security Advisory 981374 Released

Microsoft Security Response Center(MSRC) Blog, March 09, 2010

Hi everyone,

Today we released Security Advisory 981374 addressing a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 8 is not affected by this issue. Customers using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 should upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 immediately to benefit from the improved security features and defense in depth protections. Additionally, Internet Explorer 5.01 on Windows 2000 is not affected.

At this time, we are aware of targeted attacks seeking to exploit this vulnerability against Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer Protected Mode in Internet Explorer 7 running on Windows Vista helps to mitigate the impact of this issue. Additionally, Internet Explorer on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 runs in a restricted mode that is known as Enhanced Security Configuration. This mode sets the security level for the Internet zone to High. This is a mitigating factor for Web sites that you have not added to the Internet Explorer Trusted sites zone. Please review the Security Advisory for additional workarounds which include modifying the Access Control List (ACL) on iepeers.dll (the affected component), setting the Internet and local Intranet security zones to "high", configuring Internet Explorer to prompt before running Active Scripting, and enabling Data Execution Prevention (DEP) where possible which makes it difficult to successfully exploit the vulnerability.

More.......

-Microsoft Security Advisory (981374)

Vulnerability in Internet Explorer Could Allow Remote Code Execution

Published: March 09, 2010

Link

The Economics of Spam & Botnets

To state that it has been a while since my last blog post would be an understatement.  I will quote a true unnamed mentor of mine and just say, “Life Happens.”   My work changed and brought me into the world of Project Management.  This subject almost interests me as much as Information Security.  I want to highlight this TechRepublic article because it describes the most recent top 10 spam botnets.  The economic reasons for spam and why the spammers use botnets became somewhat clearer to me.    

The top 10 spam botnets: New and improved

 by Michael Kassner, February 25th, 2010

While doing research for this project, I came across a blog series (first, second, third post) that forced me to rethink. Ranking spam botnets is not as simple as I thought. The blog author, Terry Zink, pointed out that there are several measurement philosophies:

• The number of bot members
• The number of bytes sent
• The number of messages sent

In the grand scheme of things, it may not seem important. But techies like details. Counting the number of bot members or bytes sent is straightforward enough. You would assume that the number of messages would be, too.

Well, it’s not. Botnets are smart enough to create a spam message but address it to a lot of different recipients. That adds another factor when counting messages.

Confused? So am I. To make some sense out of it all, I juggled the different attributes (totally unscientifically, of course) and came up with the following list of the best of the breed.

More here……