Apple Discontinuing Support for QuickTime for Windows

Windows users should be aware of is the fact that Apple is discontinuing development of QuickTime for Windows, so it's time to uninstall it. There are known vulnerabilities that will not be patched. 

QuickTime .MOV files can be played in iTunes or VLC.

Link.

"Technical Glitches." Uh huh.

Unless you were under a rock, you know about the following three things:

1. The Chinese stock market dive.
2. "Technical glitches" grounding all United Airlines flights in the US yesterday.
3. "Technical glitches" causing all trading to be halted for several hours on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday.

On Tuesday, this was tweeted by Anonymous:

Unless the network and system admins at UAL and the NYSE are totally incompetent, they have major redundancy in place to prevent shutdowns like this from happening. There's simply too much money at stake to have single points of failure.

Now, was Anonymous responsible? Perhaps it was someone looking to divert attention from the Chinese stock market meltdown. Whatever really happened I doubt that the powers that be would share the truth, for fear of upsetting the apple cart.

My tinfoil hat feels a bit warm. It would be a good time to revisit your emergency preparations.

Street Robberies and You

Over on Survival and Emergency Preparedness I've posted about a current thread on Arfcom, "Street Robberies and You - The Basics." This thread started out by "BurnedOutLEO" is one of the very best essays I've read on dealing with violent criminals.

Go read it.

Microsoft Security Essentials v2

Without much fanfare, Microsoft has released version 2 of its Security Essentials antivirus and antispyware program.  This was not an automatic update.  I read about it in the Urban Commandos forum on AR15.com and downloaded the installer manually.

I’ve been running MSE on a number of machines now for over a year and it’s been both trouble free and better performing than my previous choice in free AV software, AVG.

If I notice anything weird I’ll make a note of it.

Zero Day Vulnerability in Adobe Reader

There is a zero day security exploit for the Adobe PDF Reader that is currently out in the wild and for which there is no patch.  It exploits a vulnerability in Reader’s Javascript implementation.

Details here.

If you must use Adobe Reader you should disable Javascript until this is fixed.

• On Windows, launch Adobe Reader and go to Edit > Preferences > JavaScript and uncheck Enable Acrobat JavaScript.
• On a Mac, launch Adobe Reader go to the Adobe Reader menu > Preferences > JavaScript and uncheck Enable Acrobat JavaScript.
  

Alternative free PDF viewers are Preview.app on Mac (included with OS X), and Foxit Reader on Windows.

A Little PC Cleanup Today

This morning I was asked to do a favor for one of our electrical contractors, who'd brought his home PC in with the hopes of getting it cleaned up.  Specifically, it was infected with the "Personal Antivirus" malware program, which looks quite a bit like AVG Antivirus, which is of course a legit program.

Hitting Google for removal instructions, the first link I clicked on recommended using Malware Bytes to get rid of Personal Antivirus.  I've recently been evaluating Malware Bytes, so I figured this would be a good test on a system known to be infected.  It worked, and picked up a few other items as well.  Good deal.

After getting that squared away I also installed Spybot Search & Destroy for realtime protection, the HOSTS file from MVPS.org, and CCleaner.

The system was already setup to receive Windows updates automatically, so the final piece of software I loaded was Firefox with the Adblock Plus extension.  I imported all the bookmarks and settings from IE but left the latter as the default browser.

Before returning the PC to my boss I taped a note to the side with a description of what I'd done and with some recommendations, including replacing Norton 360 with AVG, and using Firefox instead of IE.

Sony Shipping Rootkits Again

A couple of years ago, Sony BMG got caught shipping music CDs with "rootkits" on them, which installed software onto PCs when the buyer put the CD in to play it.  A rootkit is software which allows a hacker to remotely take over a system.

Sony is AGAIN shipping products with rootkits installed.  This time it's USB drives.  Here's the story at Computer World, an IT industry journal.

It is not specified in the article what systems are vulnerable.  Windows PCs certainly, Macs unlikely but possible based on the limited information that's been publicly released.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  I regard buying Sony technology products as too risky.

EDIT 9/24/08: I had a brainfart and misread the date on the article to which I linked.  It's from August 2007, not last month as I originally thought.  That said, Sony still won't be getting any of my business.

Dealt With a Real Life Mac Trojan Horse Tonight

We all know that Macs are more secure than Windows PCs by virtue of the design of the operating system. That said, the only computer that cannot be compromised is the one that's powered off, disconnected from any networks, and locked away in a box. Case in point: tonight I helped a colleague with a Mac that was infected with the OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan Horse.

A Trojan Horse is different from a virus. Unlike viruses, Trojans aren't self-replicating, and require some user intervention to install. They frequently are designed so that they trick and unsuspecting user into installing them. For example, going to a website and being prompted to download a video codec from the site to play content.

It started off with this email:

"My brothers DNS on his mac keeps going to 85.225.113.131 for his DNS setting regardless of what is his his DHCP server."

Googling that IP address didn't turn up anything. However, Googling for "mac dns trojan" came up with this gem, which described the symptoms perfectly. Doing a little more searching, this time for "remove mac dns trojan" led me to this.

Lessons to be learned:

1. Macs are generally very secure. That doesn't mean they are perfectly secure.
2. Only install software from trusted sites. If you're surfing the web and a site prompts you to install something, take a moment to seriously consider whether you really need to do so, especially if it prompts you for your administrative password.

Tor

I'm taking the day off to unwind after our weekend trip to Virginia, so naturally I'm playing around on the 'puter. ;)

Anyway, today I installed Tor on Rohan the MacBook Pro. As described by its developers:

Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens. See the Who Uses Tor? page for examples of typical Tor users. See the overview page for a more detailed explanation of what Tor does, why this diversity of users is important, and how Tor works.

To make using Tor easier I downgraded Firefox from the latest version 3 release candidate back to v2.0.0.14, and installed the Torbutton extension, which hasn't yet been updated for FF3. Torbutton allows me to "Torify" my Firefox traffic with a single mouse click, and to disable it just as easily.

Compared with going directly to the Internet, web traffic through Tor is markedly slower. Since you're routing your traffic through a network of onion routers to obscure your trail, that stands to reason. So, I don't plan to use Tor by default.

However, there may be times when I need to research or relay sensitive information, on behalf of myself or others. Tor will help me do that in a more secure fashion. Another reason for me to try it is to see how Tor traffic looks on a LAN, so that I can recognize it (if that's possible).

Cross-platform encryption

I want to save digital copies of important documents on a USB stick, but want to secure them against unauthorized access if the drive gets into the wrong hands, because it would be an identity thief's wet dream. The stick will be part of my household emergency kit.

Today I discovered jFileCrypt, a cross-platform encryption/decryption tool written in Java, and which can run on any platform with Java 5. Aside from the fact that it's free (GPL) software, being platform-independent is what I really find attactive. JFileCrypt supports Blowfish so the resulting encrypted file should be secure.

Alternatives include Mac OS X's built-in ability to create encrypted disk images and GPG. Unfortunately, an ecrypted Mac disk image isn't cross platform, and GPG can be confusing, although I've been playing around with it and I'm getting a better understanding of it. For Windows and Linux users, TrueCrypt looks like a good alternative.

Ideally, I'd like to have an ~500 MB encrypted file or folder on a 1 GB USB drive. On the unencrypted portion I'll keep a copy of the encryption utility so that if necessary, I can decrypt the information even if I don't have access to one of my computers. The password I'll be using is long, non-obvious, and has zero significance to anyone other than me.

If any of my readers have suggestions for cross-platform encryption software that would be suitable for this application, please post them as a comment.

(This will be crossposted to my Survial & Emergency Preparedness blog, but this blog gets more traffic so I'm posting it here first.)