Microsoft released like every month an ISO image of the security releases of this month to the public. It is mainly intended for system administrators who need to apply the updates to a number of computers without using an automated solution.
New Phishing Mail Tactics
I guess every user with an email address has already received at least one email from a bank, financial website or other website asking him to download a security patch to avoid account termination or a ban. Those mails are so common nowadays that they seem to lack the desired affect and that less and less users are falling for those phishing emails that point to the download of a Trojan of course and not a security update.
HijackReader analyse HijackThis results
HiJackThis is a sophisticated security tool that checks a computer running Windows 2000 or higher for possible signs of hijacked applications. It does check lots of different elements like startup items, Browser Helper Objects, running processes and the like and presents a log of the results at the end. This log is hard to read for beginners because it contains “good” and possible “bad” elements in it and it requires knowledge of those elements to make a distinction between elements that you have to keep and those that are indeed malicious in nature.
Critical Adobe Reader Update
Adobe has released the version 8.1.2 of Adobe Reader which is a critical update that patches a security vulnerability. Adobe recommends that users patch their version of Adobe Reader to the newest as soon as possible to close the security hole. The strange thing about this update is that only 26 of the 27 fixes of this update are listed in the release notes and that the security vulnerability that has been fixed is not listed on that page.
Trend Micro RUBotted
Trend Micro RUBotted is a BETA program that scans your system for bot related activity protecting it effectively from being hijacked and misused for criminal activity. The computer is monitored for activity that is either harmful for the computer it is running on or other computers that are affected by actions from the monitored computer.
Remove Stored .Net User Names and Passwords
Windows XP and Windows Vista save username and password information for network resources and services like Windows Live on the hard drive of the operating system. If you want to check if and which usernames and passwords are stored with the option to remove some or all of them you can do the following.
What is connecting to the Internet
If you want to find out which programs have a standing Internet connection you could use the software Procx. Procx is a process and module manager much like the well acclaimed Process Explorer from Sysinternals. One difference though is that Procx is displaying a green icon next to each process or module if it has [...]
