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Welcome to the Viruswarning forums. All your original content has been ported to the new forums as well as new content and additional opportunities to interact with the authors of Viruswarn.com. You can always access old content at www.leedrake.com/forum . You may find some formatting was lost in the conversion and the older versions of the posts to be more readable....
But at least it's all here.
Enjoy!
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Viruswarn Forums
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| Author |
Messages |
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Lee Drake
Posts:238
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| 05/20/2002 1:47 PM |
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| Although the title of this listserv is "Virus Warning" we will also
occasionally delve into the realm of "vulnerabilities", where we feel there
is a well thought out fix, and that fix is released. A vulnerability is a
weakness in a program that would allow it to be exploited in an unscrupulous
manner by a web page, worm or virus in the future. These vulnerabilities
are frequently entirely theoretical - no one has actually seen them applied
in the wild as a virus or worm - they were found by someone who was trying
to break or break into the software.
The latest ones you may have heard about involve internet explorer, outlook,
and Outlook express. These vulnerabilities were discovered by a gentleman
who works for Netscape. It's this gentleman's job to find these
vulnerabilities and then publicize the heck out of them to make Microsoft
look bad. Note that Microsoft doesn't bother hiring anyone to do the same
for it's competitors products.
Nevertheless, once publicized these vulnerabilities do become dangerous,
because there is usually enough information in the announcement of the
weakness for a programmer to know how to exploit it. So to "plug the hole"
so to speak, Microsoft releases a patch.
These latest vulnerabilities were actually fixed before they were ever
publicized. If you've been following along with us so far we have always
recommended that you use the windows update utility to keep your machine up
to date with the latest browser software and security patches. If you've
been doing that, then in all likelihood you're already safe. If you have
either Internet Explorer 5.01 sp 1 or Internet Explorer 5.5 and either
Windows 9X or Windows NT you are all set - you already have the fixes.
If you do have an older version of IE and you don't have windows 2000 we
recommend that you immediately upgrade your explorer version to one of these
two versions. 5.5 is the preferred one, though 5.01 sp 1 is smaller and
might be more suitable for modem users who want to minimized download times.
you can update your IE at:
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com
If you have Windows 2000 this is a special case - Win2k doesn't allow a
"custom install" of IE and in fact doesn't install the necessary components
even if you do upgrade to IE 5.5. The link for Windows 2000 users, or those
who cannot update to a full 5.01 sp1 or 5.5 version is at this address:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/download/critical/patch9.htm
If you're not sure what version you are running, run Outlook Express and
choose help/about to see the version number. You need to have version 5.50
or better to be protected.
If you are using Netscape for browsing but either Outlook or Outlook express
for your email you will need this patch. If you occasionally use IE for
browsing, or use products that invoke an IE window to browse within (there
are many of them these days) you should also get updated. If you never use
Microsoft components for email you will not need this patch. This includes
Qualcomm's Eudora software - it does not need the patch.
If you are using Netscape browsers, note that support for Netscape is spotty
at best in Microsoft's site- use IE to find and download the patches for
the best success. Several consumers of my last missive wrote me to say they
couldn't see the sites pointed to by the links - they were ALL using
something other than IE as their browser.
Lee Drake, Moderator |
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