Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Author: Robby Pedrica

  • Panda threats of the last 20 years

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Panda has just released a study of the most severe threats over the last 20 years. This makes for interesting reading and brings back some memories;  however, the most interesting thing about this article ( and other articles on the same topic ) is that nowhere is it mentioned that these are all Microsoft-platform viruses.…

  • The Slackware 13.0 Interview

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    It’s been a while since my last ‘Interview’ with Slackware and we’ve just had the new 13.0 release ( 26th August ), so time to brush up on Slackware as one of the premier distributions in the Linux landscape. I wasn’t quite sure where to start with this article as all the goodness of previous…

  • Thunderbird 3 update

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    Thunderbird 3 is currently at b3 and even so is still in quite a state of flux if you read the development notes. There are a lot of changes from TB2 and quite a few differences in usage as well which may catch some out. This is a short article to mention some of these…

  • Microsoft, Word and the evil patent

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    Microsoft has been recently sued by i4i ( a Canadian developer of sgml software ) for patent infringement, specifically on a custom XML feature in Word. The damages so far amount to $290m which is a considerable amount. That though is not the big problem for Microsoft: the suit includes an injunction against Microsoft selling…

  • Windows botnets take down most of the major social web services

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    Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and some other social web services were completely taken off the air this Thursday past by a massive DDoS attack aimed, wait for it, at one person – a pro-Georgian blogger called Cyxymu. This user is an activist blogger and someone doesn’t like him! So hoards of virus-infested Windows machines ( about…

  • Corrupted Intel SSDs?

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Intel has indicated that there is the possibility of corruption on X25m and X18m SSD units related to setting a drive BIOS password. The problem is triggered if a user has set a password, changes or removes the password and then reboots the host computer. Shipments of these SSDs have been suspended however here in…

  • Groklaw, Sys-Con Media and journalism

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    Robby Pedrica
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    I’ve been a keen follower of Pamela Jones’ editorial on the SCO-IBM case for a number of years now, mainly because of the importance of the topic but also because of Pamela’s straightforward and factual journalism style. Whether or not this is her real persona has never been an issue with me because her facts…

  • DNS Security

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    Robby Pedrica
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    .. has always been a hot topic, considering that it is the cornerstone of the Internet. Without DNS or with a broken DNS, the Internet stops working ( correctly ) so it’s important that this building block is always in top shape, something that has been lacking from time to time. Considering it’s age and…

  • Bind security issues

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    Robby Pedrica
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    This time the security issue is with BIND 9 specifically and not DNS in general as Dan Kaminsky’s fabled cache poisoning issue from last year. Receipt of a specially-crafted dynamic update message to a zone for which the server is the master may cause BIND 9 servers to exit. Slaves are unaffected however. Patches are…

  • Internet Explorer patch

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    This past Tuesday saw Microsoft release a patch targeting a number of vulnerabilities in its browser on Windows 2000 and XP platforms ( possible IE 5, 6 and 7 ). The bugs relate to how IE handles objects in memory and table operations, more specifically it could allow remote code execution. The vulnerabilities can be…

  • Microsoft, Hyper-V drivers for Linux and the GPL

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    Microsoft released some drivers for Linux running on Hyper-V this week, with a lot of bell ringing and fanfare. Most people don’t know that behind the scenes, a protracted battle has been fought due to the fact that Microsoft have had these drivers for some time but they weren’t GPL-compliant. Microsoft have now been forced…

  • Cluster and distributed filesystems

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    This is a surprisingly large ecosystem for an area of OS’s that would on the face of it seem very specialised. I think there are a few  facts that are bringing these features to the mainstream: 1. we’re looking at new IT innovations like cloud computing 2. management interfaces to provide these features are being…

  • This week’s security and more botnets

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    Robby Pedrica
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    This week’s security issues are dominated by Oracle and Adobe Acrobat/Reader flaws – Oracle’s issues look to be in remote access and listener areas while Reader/Acrobat are to do with image decoding buffer overflows ( 14! ). Perhaps Adobe should do some code checking once in a while considering the high rate of vulnerabilities they…

  • Recent source of Mydoom attacks found – UK

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    The recent DDoS attacks on SKorean and US websites have been found to have originated out of the UK, with analysis indicating an estimated size of 176000 botnet-controlled PCs! The master host was also found to be a Windows 2003 Server machine. Seeing as the IP address is known, it will be interesting to see…

  • Old Windows viruses just keep on coming

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The 2nd week of this month saw a large number of DDoS attacks on prominent US and South Korean web sites. Many thousands of compromised Windows PCs were used through a botnet to perform these attacks with a subtle variation of the Mydoom virus/worm. Considering that Mydoom was released in Jan 2004, it’s surprising (…