Identify And Analyze Malicious Webpages
Update: Malzilla hs not been updated since 2008 which indicates that the project has been abandoned by its developers. While still available for download, it may not be up for the task […]
Apple Might Be Watching You
What is good customer service? Customers would usually state that good customer service means fast and effective solutions for difficulties with a product of a company. What about a company that actively […]
Firephorm - the anti-phorm Firefox extension
We have covered Phorm before here on Ghacks. It is a very scary cooperation between several Internet Service Providers and advertising companies. The Internet Service Providers install tracking cookies on user systems […]
Right To Search Laptops To Be Limited On US Borders
The right of US border guards to search the laptops will be limited today according to a news post on the Internet news site Vnunet (article no longer available). The current policy […]
Adobe Flash Player Clickjacking Vulnerability
Dante send me a link to an interesting article that describes the latest Adobe Flash Player vulnerability. Adobe published a security advisory yesterday that describes a clickjacking vulnerability. In short: An attacker […]
Time To Look For A Skype Alternative
The voice over IP client Skype never got off of the radar of privacy activists. There were always rumors about backdoors in the voice communication software and that several organizations were allowed […]
The Brits Surely Know How To Spread Confidential Data
Living in the United Kingdom surely has its bright sides: you got the IT Crowd, Cider and James Bond. On the downside, British government officials have been known for their lax data […]
One Password Management Software To Rule Them All
Choosing secure passwords is important to protect the user accounts from being accessed by unauthorized users. The problem that arises for all users is that secure passwords are harder to remember. Writing […]
PeerGuardian Error Contacting URL
PeerGuardian is an IP (Internet Protocol) blocker for Windows which is highly popular in the file sharing community but also with security and privacy interested users. The software works by providing access […]
The iPhone Home Button Is A Security Risk
Now that makes for an interesting opening. When a user taps the iPhone's home button it shrinks and disappears which is a nice looking effect. The problem is that the iPhone is […]
Windows Security Updates September 2008
Microsoft has released four Microsoft Security Bulletins for September 2008. All updates are rated critical and it is recommended to update the computer system running Windows operating systems or Microsoft software as […]
Password Software
Keeping track of all the different user accounts, passwords, security questions and emails associated with them is quite a daring task. Some users create all accounts with the same data, while others […]
Take Back Your Privacy By Disabling Auto Suggest In IE8
The fact that Google Chrome is sending information about anything that the user types into the Google Chrome Omnibox seems to have caused quite a stir on the Internet with reports about […]
Hacker Breaks into FEMA Phone System, Makes $12,000 Worth of Calls
I just came across an amusing news excerpt about the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, which is a part of Homeland Security. For those of you who don't know, Homeland Security […]
Freedom Stick Is Better Than Freedom Fries
No, I'm not referring to something called French Fries that has been renamed to Freedom Fries to punish the French for not siding with the US in the country's war against terror. […]
A New Vulnerability Discovered in μTorrent
As far as file-sharing protocols go, BitTorrent has emerged as one of the leading P2P technologies being used. μTorrent is one of the most popular BitTorrent apps around, largely because of its […]
Microsoft August 2008 Security Updates
Microsoft has just released the security patches of the August 2008 Patch Day, a total of eleven updates for various Microsoft operating systems and products that are recommended updates. Six of the […]
Apple Can Remove Apps From iPhones
The public outcry would be loud and ear-deafening if someone would have discovered that Microsoft was able to remove installed applications from a Windows operating system. But it is Apple this time […]
Customs Proofing A Laptop
I Discovered the article Security guide to customs-proofing your laptop over at Cnet and thought it would be worth sharing it. It does not really add anything new to the discussion and […]
Free A-Squared Anti-Malware
The Giveaway of the Day website is offering some very nice software packages from time to time. Today's offer is A-Squared Anti-Malware in version 3.5 from Emsisoft which can be freely downloaded […]
New Phishing Emails Emerge
The usual phishing email still claims that "action" is required because of something that just happened. This can be a fake eBay purchase, PayPal transfer, a bank account transaction or someone offering […]
New Attack: Combine Files With Jar Scripts
A new attack, dubbed Gifar by their creators named after the two file types that they mixed to create the attack (Gif and Jar), was mentioned in a Black Hat Sneak Preview […]
Check If Your DNS Is Vulnerable
Humans are not good with numbers. At least not many are. That's why the DNS, the Domain Name System, is in place. It translates the addresses that we enter in the browser […]
Male or Female? Your Browser's History Might Tell
A website should not be able to read the the history of websites that a visitor to the site has visited previously in the web browser. An ingenious CSS hack and some […]
42 Kilobytes Unzipped Make 4.5 Petabytes
In 2001 reports about Zip Bombs or Zip of Death attacks made the round on the Internet and I thought it would be nice to write about one shiny harmless example of […]
Skype Backdoor Speculations
The well respected German website Heise Online has fueled speculations about a backdoor that is implemented in the Voice over IP software Skype. According to Heise the Austrian interior minister revealed at […]
Protect PayPal Accounts With VeriSign Identity Protection Devices
I had a rather unpleasant experience with PayPal lately where someone transferred all the money from my account. PayPal was not very forthcoming and I do not know until today how this […]
Data Can Leak From Partially Encrypted Systems
A bunch of researchers, among them the famous Bruce Schneier, have discovered that features like Recent Documents list may reveal information about files on an encrypted partition even when used in conjunction […]
Gmail Has a Privacy Problem
You might have already read elsewhere that it is possible to reveal the real name of any Gmail user by sharing a calendar in Google Calendar with him. Let me explain how […]
Update on my PayPal Story
I noticed in the beginning of July that someone else transferred most of the money that had been in my PayPal account to an online hoster to buy six month access to […]
Gmail And Yahoo Mail Users Now Protected Against eBay And PayPal Phishing Mails
The award for the longest title ever could go to this one. But it's good news actually. Both Email services are "supporting email authentication standards including DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) […]
Overview of Online Virus Scanners
Scanning the computer from an online location provides several advantages over the classic local scan. The most prominent one is that the risk of a virus infection of the virus scanner is […]
Tracking Gmail Account Usage
Google Mail introduced a new feature recently that can be helpful in finding out if someone else has or had access to your Gmail account. The function is a bit hidden in […]
Gernova Keylock
Gernova Keylock is a specialized software to detect keyloggers on a system. Keyloggers are used to log user input which includes urls that the user enters as well as usernames, passwords and […]
Are you running the latest browser version?
In a recently released research paper Stefan Frei, Thomas Dübendorfer, Gunter Ollmann and Martin May analyzed Google Search Engine logs between January 2007 and June 2008 to understand web browser security. The […]
Unauthorized Payment Done With My PayPal Account
I usually check my emails right after I wake up and received a PayPal email receipt this morning that told me that the amount of $480 was transferred from my account. I […]
Haute Secure
The Internet can be a dangerous place. Especially for those users who do not care but simply use the computer. A click on the wrong website and the computer can be infected […]
You better stop using Internet Explorer for now
A security vulnerability came to light recently that affects Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and even Internet Explorer 8 that can be exploited to record keystrokes users even when that user […]
British Telecom Phorm report leaked
An internal British Telecom document was released two days ago on the Wikileak website that provides the results of British Telecom's validation of Phorm, also known as (aka 121Media) Deep Packet Inspection. […]
New Information about latest Flash Vulnerability
A report about a new Flash vulnerability that affected the latest two versions of Adobe Flash was spreading like fire on the Internet yesterday. The Flash Vulnerability was used on specially prepared […]
