Security Vulnerability Research & Defense

When it comes to computer security most people are happy to ensure automatic updates is turned or WSUS is configured

Some of us go a little further than that and make sure we’re 100% up-to-date on the latest patches and issues. If Susan’s blog inspires ONE person to rethink their attitude to patching it’s a step in the right direction

 Anyway, last night there were a whole load of security updates on the Microsoft download website.

If you subscribe to the The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) blog you’ll already have had advance warning of this. As i was reading through the January release details they mentioned a blog i hadn’t seen before. It’s quite new and is called the Security Vulnerability Research & Defense blog

The blog goes into detail about the information Microsoft discover when researching vulnerabilities. Ensuring your getting updates from the security response center is probably enough, but if the geek in you wants to know more about HOW software gets compromised take a look.

I find the subject fascinating, even if a lot of it does goes straight over my head!

Naughty Naughty Microsoft

Internet Explorer UpdateOriginally uploaded by Andy Parkes

I got this email today. As far as i can tell it’s a kosher email from Microsoft trying to get you to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 which is fine..thats perfectly normal right?

What i found a bit weird thouh was when you click on the image

I expected to be taken to a landing page where it would outline advantages of upgrading.blah..blah ..blah,etc

What happens though is that the link is for the download itself, which happens to be called SETUP.EXE

You click the image and get prompted to run or save setup.exe, this surely is a bit wrong as it looks dreadfully suspicious?

Has anyone else see this? Can they confirm it’s a real microsoft email?

Cry for help! (Visual Foxpro on Windows 2003)

** UPDATE ** - I’ve managed to come up with a work around, i’ve detailed it at the end of the post  

I need some help

I recently did an SBS 2003 installation for a client. They have been on SBS 2000 for a long time and getting them to move on was “painful”

Anyway the migration went well and we were getting people back to work when someone noticed their custom LOB application wasn’t performing too well

It’s a Visual Foxpro 6 application (yes i know it’s not supported anymore) and in certain parts of the system it take a long time to perform table operations (filter, select,etc) where it was instantaneous on the old server

I’ve done a lot of troubleshooting to make sure it’s not corrupt indexes, problems with the infrastruture, etc

I’ve double checked that all works well if i connect back to the old server and it is fine if i log onto the new server and run it locally so i think the problem is with Windows 2003 and Visual FoxPro not playing too nicely when serving the data over the network

They are aware that Visual Foxpro 6 is a little long in the tooth and have plans to have get the program rewritten in a modern language but this isn’t going to happen overnight

I’m also not too keen on telling them their brand new server cripples their main business application!

I’m toying with setting up a virtual server but this may get expensive as a temporary fix!

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks 

** UPDATE **

Looks like my theory about the problem lying with how Windows 2003 gets the data onto the network was correct

As part of the new server installation the client also purchased a NAS. This is to be used for storing backup images.

I’ve put the data onto the NAS and the problem goes away. The NAS is linux based i believe

This isn’t a fix but more of a workaround. The client is aware that they need to get the software updated but this will work until that gets sorted. I’d still like to hear anyones thoughts as why i was having the problem in the first place.

That’s so 2007

2007 saw a lot of new trends come to the fore. However, with so many new and exciting ideas its difficult to figure out what’s useful

I was catching up on some reading and saw Steve Clayton’s post entitled “What is a blog?” which links to a rather cool video explaining what a blog is in plain english

The video was created by CommonCraft and they have some other really useful videos explaining other concepts

Some of the others i really liked, (this is my first attempt at embedding video so if your reading this via the feed and can’t see them jump onto the actual page)

Social Bookmarking in plain english – (think del.icio.us)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU]

Social Networking in plain english (think facebook)

[youtube=http://www,youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc]

and wikis in plain english (e.g wikipedia ,a sharepoint v.3 wiki, pbwiki, etc)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY]

Simple concepts made easier…YAY!