Symantec warns of router compromise

Security company Symantec has warned of an attack involving the subversion of routers.

The security company said this was the first time it had seen such an attack "in the wild," although the concept had been discussed a year ago by Symantec researchers, according to a Symantec blog post.

In the attack, which targeted users of an undisclosed Mexican bank, the intended victims received a spam e-mail claiming they had received an e-card, directing them to gusanto.com, a Spanish-language e-card site. However, the e-mail also had embedded HTML image tags that contained an HTTP get-request to the router to change its Domain Name System settings, according to Symantec's U.K. manager of quality assurance, Thomas Parsons.

The HTTP get-request redirects traffic flowing over the router to a specific IP address when the user attempts to access six domain names that are banking-related. Symantec requested that ZDNet UK not publish the IP address.

The attack is made possible by a cross-site scripting vulnerability in routers made by broadband-equipment company 2Wire that was reported in August last year, according to Symantec. Parsons said this was "a simple hack" and advised small to medium-size businesses to change default security settings on routers and educate users about clicking on suspicious links.

What if Open Source ain't "Open" no more

We all have somewhere and sometime heard the word Open source. If anyone of you haven't then for you "Ignorance is a bliss". We all love, Firefox, Flock, SeaMonkey, Linux, and MySQL. These are a few to name among the others. Go check out if you are curious about others at SourceForge. This is a great site that's the hub for all the open source projects.

Now wonder what would happen if all the open source suddenly becomes closed source. That's nightmarish to be sure, but I have to ask how much of the nightmare is not wholly real.

Tell me what you feel and go crazy with the idea and it's reprecussions.

Technorati Tags: Hold on Please

Firefox Ultimate Optimizer Update

I was using Norton 360 with all the updates when I started using Firefox Ultimate Optimizer with no problem. However, as I moved to BitDefender Total Security 2008 with a compelete update it triggered an alert and removed Firefox Ultimate Optimizer. It was idenified as a Trojan. Following is the snapshot of the log (scratched the user name):



Make sure you scan the file with your antivirus and use it at your own risk.

Technorati Tags: Optimize Firefox, Firefox Ultimate Optimizer

Extension compatiblity for Firefox 3 Beta

Life isn't all that easy when you have updates and upgrades available at such rapid pace as Mozilla Firefox project. With an upgrade usually the framework is so much modified that your current Firefox extensions don't work with the Alpha or Beta release. Now if you have an intermitent problem of testing newer non-stable versions of softwares then you miss out on the extensibility feature.

For example, there are very few extensions of Firefox 2.0.* which are compatible with Firefox 3 Beta. Hold on please, there is a tweak to get all your extensions working with Firefox 3 beta release. From what I have experienced the so called and much awaited FF 3 has some cool features. I have not played around with it much, but the first problem that I faced was to get all my extensions working with this new release. Here's what you have to do to get all your extensions working. I must caution you though that there could be extensions that might make your firefox unstable and make it crash. From what I have read All-in-one gestures when used with this tweak makes it crash for the first time. Also, this can cause some security glitch as well. So please use it at your own risk. Following are the steps:

• In a new tab type about:config. You get a beautiful (and funny) window which looks like this.

• You know which button to hit. Once you reach the about:config page look for an entry named extensions.checkCompatibility.
• If you see the entry then change the value to false.
• However, if you did not find an entry, then right click any where on the page and under new select boolean.
• Set it's value to false.
• That's all. Now you should have an entry that looks like this

• Close Firefox and restart. See the magic, all your old extesions are now working and are visible.

You see a warning message marked with an arrow like the following:

Help yourself with further experimentation. And remember it's a tweak that means it's not suppose to be tweaked to avoid any glitches. I am sure with the final release all the extensions will be compatible. There is another way as well to make extensions compatible, but for that you have to make code level changes and I am not discussing them. Let me know if someone wants to do it that way.

Technorati Tags: Incompatible Firefox extensions, Firefox Extension compatibility, Firefox Beta 3

Leechers of browsing speed...

And you thought pop-ups (of course pop-unders) were nagging. More than them are the leechers that sit right into the web page. You got it right I am talking about all the flash ads which have off late become the most preferred from of advertisements. First as being embedded objects they flirt with your browsing speed as they need to be downloaded as any other web object and secondly of the flashy nature. No offense to the people who work with them and have their earnings by these flash objects. I am sure you hate them as much as I do. But hold on please their is a solution.

If you are a Firefox (both 2 and 3 beta) or flock user then you have a sweet extension called as flashblock. This extension blocks all the flash objects and loads them only when you click them and hence considerably increasing the web page load time. There's a tweak though as most of the video players use flash movie players these videos are blocked too and hence you have to click them to watch them. As a suggestion to the person who has written it I am sure he can modify the code to make the extension sit in the status bar and could be toggled on an off by click of mouse. Thus allowing the user to chose for which site the flashblock is on and for which it is off. I can write it but I have other things in my kitty right now. I am sure there also exists a solution for Internet Explorer but I am not wasting my time looking for one because I firmly believe that it's not the browser of future (in fact it ain't even the browser of present). I don't use it unless the site is not firefox compliant (which today is not the case for most of the sites).

PS: Did you know that Opera is much better XHTML complaint compared to firefox.

Technorati Tags: Blocking Flash, Flashblock, Firefox

Want More Space

How many of you boast yourself to be nerds like me. It's obnoxious sometimes to say yourself nerds when you actually know that you are a novice and real nerds are out there. Anyways nothing better having the feeling that you are nerds and I have succeeded in making myself happy thinking of being a nerd.

Coming to the point though. Now that you are nerd I am sure you face the same problem of exhausting hard disk space. We all know that most of the space is used by your fetish porn collection ! lol. Let's face it. Even if you were given 1 TB of disk space and a 100 mbps LAN, I am sure you would be running out of the disk space pretty soon. So coming to the real stuff, there's a compression utility called as KGB Archiver. This is not a new kid on the block but for sure deserves the right for being on the wall of fame.

Just to tell you this freak of an utility can compress data in a ratio that's unbelievable. I have Windows Vista Ultimate with Office 2007 Ultimate compressed in a 4 MB file. Are you shocked! Give it a try for yourself.

Here are some test results from the site which is the home to this amazing utility.

Format	Size	Ratio
Uncompressed text data	19900KB	100%
ZIP, maximum compression	4922KB	24,7%
ZIP, Deflate64, maximum compression	4865KB	24,4%
CAB, LZX - maximum compression	3559KB	17,9%
BZIP2, dictionary 900KB	3399KB	17,1%
RAR, maximum compression, solid archive	3220KB	16,2%
UHA, maximum compression, dictionary 32MB, multimedia compression	3171KB	15,9%
7zip, ultra compression, solid archive, dictionary 48MB, word size 255B	2726KB	13,7%
SQX2.0, ultra compression, dictionary 32MB, solid archive, multimedia & EXE compression	2631KB	13,2%
KGB, normal compression	2339KB	11,8%
KGB, medium compression*	1543KB	7,8%

Let me warn you though, the home page says something like this KGB Archiver is the compression tool with an unbelievably high compression rate. Unfortunately, in spite of its powerful compression rate, it has high hardware requirements (I recommend processor with 1,5GHz clock and 256MB of RAM as an essential minimum). One of the advantages of KGB Archiver is also AES-256 encryption which is used to encrypt the archives. This is one of the strongest encryptions known for human.

Also, I once tried decompressing a 4 GB file archived using KGB and it took me 7 hours to decompress with a good high end PC. However, I've never tried compressing data using KGB. So Hold on please. Next time you crib of running out hard disk space, think again!

Technorati Tags: Hold on please, KGB archiver, High compression

Firefox is Memory Leaking..

How many of you (of course people who don't shut down their PC and redefine Load testing) have seen your Firefox shooting up to 500 MB of memory (I am wondering what it used to be in the days when 64 MB was the common standard for RAM). I know it sucks when your favorite browser (Favorite more coz it's open source and of course extensible) sucks up your RAM and leaves you with too less physical memory for other great memory consuming Windows applications (LOL, I remember when Bill gates once said that never will any version of Windows require more than 64 MB of RAM).

All this has left you with imagining if you want to uninstall Firefox. But Hold on Please there's a little piece of utility written in some foreign language by a guy with Pseudonym FelipEX that dramatically optimizes firefox's memory consumption. Don't believe me, try it out yourself. Search for the utility by named "Firefox Ultimate Optimizer" and try it yourself. Just to tell you the results.

My Firefox was using 388 MB before installation and as I write this post, post installation Firefox Ultimate Optimizer, firefox is just consuming 28 MB of RAM. So, Hold on Please before you think about uninstalling Firefox. A word of caution though, I have not tested this utility enough and cannot tell you as yet whether it drastically reduces the performance of Firefox.

Technorati Tags: Firefox Ultimate Optimizer, Hold on Please, Optimizing Firefox, Firefox memory leaking problem