Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Category: Computer Tech

  • Adventures in Linux distro land

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The number of articles lately concerning the overwhelming amount of Linux distributions available is quite interesting; why now? Perhaps because Linux on the desktop is becoming a little more mainstream. Or perhaps because of the miriad number of embedded devices that use Linux ( think home automation, signage boards, NAS storage, netbooks, phones, radios, media…

  • IE in trouble again

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Only a day after the last patch was released for IE that fixed problems relating to the Google ( and other ) attacks from December, a number of new vulnerabilities have been found in IE ( no version details yet ) which when combined, can lead to remote execution on a Windows PC. Core Security…

  • The Internet is a BIIIIIG place!

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    Robby Pedrica
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    We take a lot of what happens on the Internet for granted but the numbers that make up the Internet are staggering to say the least. Here’s a small subset from 2009 of what goes on out there: 247 billion emails per day 81% of email is spam ( that’s 200 billion per day )…

  • Widespread Attacks on IE bug start

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The first widespread attack to leverage a recently patched flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has surfaced. Starting late Wednesday, researchers began spotting dozens of Web sites that contain the Internet Explorer attack, which works reliably on the IE 6 browser, running on Windows XP. The attack installs a Trojan horse program that is able…

  • Firefox 3.6 released

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The Mozilla Foundation is releasing the latest and greatest version of its Web browser, Firefox 3.6.

  • 17-year old security hole in all Windows versions

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    Robby Pedrica
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    I sometimes feel as if I’m picking on Microsoft for its crappy security ( there’s always some new hole to talk about ) but then I sit back and realise that their products really do have poor security and I don’t need to feel ashamed for reporting on it. For example, a Google engineer recently…

  • Microsoft Internet Explorer security patches released

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Microsoft on Thursday issued a cumulative critical patch for Internet Explorer that fixes eight vulnerabilities, including a hole targeted in the China-based attacks on Google and other U.S. companies. The security update is rated critical for all supported releases of IE 5, 6, 7, and 8, according to the advisory. The more severe vulnerabilities could…

  • ‘Dump Internet Explorer’ says France

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    Robby Pedrica
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    It seems it wasn’t only the Germans who thought it necessary to suggest the use of a browser alternative to IE – the French Certa agency ( which looks after cyber threats in France ) have now weighed  in on the matter and suggested the same. And they’ve included all versions of IE in this…

  • Microsoft breaks Perl CPAN testers system

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    Robby Pedrica
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    As if Microsoft hasn’t got it’s hands full enough with security breaches in it’s software aiding the Chinese in attacks on US companies, it has now been implicated in DoS attacks on the Perl CPAN testers’ system of sites, databases and mirrors. The problem appears to be that Microsoft’s bots do not adhere to the…

  • Google, China and security

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    Robby Pedrica
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    A drama of world-wide proportions ( that wouldn’t out of place in a Hollywood blockbuster ) has been playing out over the last week concerning Google’s operations in China. It all started with denial of service attacks against Google’s Gmail service in late December last year ( and attacks against about about 30 other US…

  • Acrobat Reader security issues

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    Robby Pedrica
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    A(nother) vulnerability in Acrobat Reader 9.2 has forced Adobe to fix it with an update to 9.3. This problem has been assigned CVE-2009-4324 and there are exploits out in the wild. So upgrade asap.

  • 2010 Date Programming snafus

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Y2K was an interesting time with the prophets of doom out in full force. And yes while there were some issues, it wasn’t quite the end of the world as we knew it. 2010 however came up on us very quietly from a date problem p.o.v. but there have been some fairly major issues worldwide…

  • On-line storage – safe or not?

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Cloud computing has become a major buzzword this year and entails the provisioning of application and storage services within a distributed system operating on the Internet. Think Google Apps ( Wave, Docs, GMail, etc. ), T-Mobile SideKick, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( EC2 )/Web Services, Salesforce, Bittorrent and many others. These can be put into…

  • Windows and on-line banking

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The 2 concepts above should never be spoken ( let alone used ) together considering the poor security track record of all Windows operating systems but somehow people still ‘trust’ the venerable OS to do their daily banking, paying of accounts and transferring of monies. So the question is why? I can only think of…

  • Adobe security issues – again

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    Robby Pedrica
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    A new 0-day vulnerability has been found in Adobe Reader and Acrobat – this time relating to how the 2 products handle Javascript. The only ‘fix’ at the moment is to turn Javascript off in these products. Or don’t open email you get from unexpected sources. Let’s see how long Adobe take to fix this…