My colleague Daniel Novomeský alerted me to a problem he's observed with the way some web-developers use JavaScript: a few of them have the habit of obfuscating JavaScript code on their web sites, presumably in order to compress it so that it takes less disk-space ("packing") or using a "protector" in order to make it

Adobe, when I disable JavaScript, STOP SILENTLY RE-ENABLING IT WHEN YOU UPDATE….

Here's another post from our colleagues in Spain (http://www.eset.es): mistakes in interpretation are down to me (David Harley). We have frequently talked about and shown examples of threats that take advantage of Black-Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This technique (BHSEO) is used by malware authors to position the malicious links in the top results when a potential

SC Magazine's Dan Raywood reports that "To be completely patched requires an average of between 51 and 86 actions per year", quoting findings by Secunia that " in order for the typical home user to stay fully patched, an average of 75 patches from 22 different vendors need to be installed, requiring the user to

There has been quite a lot of traffic in the last few weeks about the doc.media.newPlayer vulnerability referenced in the CVE database as CVE-2009-4324. The following Adobe articles refer: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa09-07.html http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/12/new_adobe_reader_and_acrobat_v.html http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2009/12/security_advisory_apsa09-07_up.html Today's article at the Internet Storm Center by Bojan Zdrnja (http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7867) gives a lot of detail on a particularly inventive exploit of the

Adobe PDF files were supposed to be a safe alternative to Microsoft Word documents in a time when Microsoft offered no effective protection against macro viruses and had virtually no security model in Office at all. Times change. Microsoft Word documents rarely spread macro viruses and have not for a long time if you are

Some of us are currently enjoying some excellent presentations at a CARO workshop in Budapest on exploits and vulnerabilities. Hopefully, some of them will eventually be made public, so that we’ll be able to include pointers to specific resources. While there’s been a great deal of technical detail made available that has passed me by

One of my all time favorite quotes is by “"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana said this in The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Common Sense 284 (2nd ed., Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, New York 1924 (originally published 1905 Charles Scribner’s

Ever since Adobe’s recent updates to Acrobat and Reader, I’ve been irritated by the fact that every time I open a PDF, I’m prompted to  re-enable JavaScript, which I disabled while we were all waiting patiently for those patches to the last round of vulnerabilities. "This document contains JavaScripts. Do you want to enable JavaScripts

Well, I’ve still had no information about updates to address the recent Acrobat vulnerability/exploits to either of the addresses I subscribed to Adobe’s Security Notification Service. However, the RSS feed here does work. Which is how I know that Acrobat Reader 9.1 and 8.1.4 for Unix were released yesterday, right on time. As expected, these address the