Posted 03/16/09 at 05:06:59 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Just when you might have thought it was safe to start using USB flash drives at work again, the third, and by all accounts, most fiendish version of the Conficker worm that's infected millions of PCs already is set to attack on April 1st, Ars Technica reports. Conficker.C's designed to hide itself even more thoroughly than its older siblings, using tricks such as:

• Inserting itself into as many as five Windows-related folders such as System, Movie Maker, Internet Explorer, and others (under a random name, of course)
• Creating access control entries and locking the file(s)
• Registers dummy services using a "one (name) from column A, one from column B, and two from column C" method

To find out what happens when Conficker.C strikes, join us after the jump.

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Posted 10/24/08 at 10:53:38 AM by Mark Edward Soper

Redmond usually releases security patches once a month, on Patch Tuesday, but Microsoft's security experts are worried enough about a newly reported vulnerability in the Server service to post an "out-of-band" security update, MS08-067, yesterday for all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 SP4 through Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 pre-beta. Microsoft hasn't issued a security update between Patch Tuesday releases since April 2007, so this is a significant security issue.

Although all supported versions of Windows are vulnerable, Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 versions are especially vulnerable to this flaw, which can permit remote code execution via a specially crafted RFC request.

To find out what makes this vulnerability so critical, and to learn how to get the update, join us after the jump.

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