RDKsoftware and web development

Probably the two most common questions I get about Anti-Virus software is "which one is best", and "are free AVs any good". Now "AV comparatives" has done a test to see which AV not only detects but removes and cleans-up after malware well. I see a few problems:

UAC (user access control) on Vista has been the target of bad press and it has been dissed by many. But is it that bad? Should you turn it off like many are suggesting? The answer is a resounding "no" and here is why.

Another attack has been proven possible on unbreakable wireless networks. I have heard WEP called "unbreakable" and I have heard the word "unbreakable" used for WPA after WEP was broken. But now both WEP and WPA have been broken. WPA2 seems to be the next best thing. However, the situation is not as dire as some make it sound. There are four items that must be secured to be able to resist the latest wireless exploits. Break these rules and you are you are vulnerable to the attack:

RIP to lite weight utilities to monitor your system.

FileMon and RegMon have now been retired from SysInternals.

Two issues I keep reading about a lot lately are that Snow Leopard's and IE8's malware detection. I wish people were making more of a deal about- WPA TKIP being broken.

This time the focus is on the Ajax Session module which should be removed from all Drupal installations.

If anybody noticed, I'm not writing regular updates about Drupal security like I did last year. If you keep your installed core, modules, and themes up to date then 90% of my 2008 posts will be redundant. Now I'm just writing about issues that go beyond keeping things up to date. For example; modules that should be avoided. Programming practices that can be dangerous.

I've been fastinated for years with paintings or prints that confuse the eye. But I always assumed that for this to work correctly, the image must be analog. Today's higher resolution seems to have altered that.

Here is a series of flash animations that shows different ways that what is percieved by the eye can be affected by its neighbors.

http://web.mit.edu/persci/gaz/gaz-teaching/index.html

In early 2000's a hacker that goes by the pseudonym "Rain Forest Puppy" (RFP) broke into the bulletin board system for the security advisory group PacketStorm. He got administrative rights and stole about 800 passwords. There is a lot that the Drupal community can learn from RFP's attack.

SA-2008-072
The storm project allows users with access to the storm project to enter data that has not been properly sanitized.

Versions Affected

• Drupal 5; anything prior to 5.x-1.14
• Drupal 6; anything prior to 6.x-1.18

SA-2008-073
There is a CSRF int the Drupal core which may allow someone to rerun old updates which will impact the database.
Also note that the robots.txt and .htaccess files have changed and need to be replaced with the new kernel.

The GPCODE.AK (also known as GPGCODE variation AK) holds the infected computers for ransom. It encrypts all the data files on a computer and tells the owner that they can get their files back with $100-$200.

It is an improvement on a virus that the AV industry has been fighting for years. Now instead of a flawed 660 bit key, they are using a much more secure 1,024 bit RSA key and no flaws have been found yet.