Vulnerabilities


Microsoft Issues Kill Fix For Windows Gadgets

A scheduled talk at the Black Hat Briefings security conference in Las Vegas later this month may have dealt a fatal blow to the once ballyhooed Windows Sidebar and Windows Gadgets. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, on Tuesday, issued a software “fix” that disables gadgets and the Windows sidebar on Vista and Windows 7 entirely.


Here’s the good news on America’s birthday: the last year has seen the U.S. emerge as an undisputed global leader in the use of offensive cyber operations. Averting another “Sputnik” moment, the nation’s longest running and most successful democracy blazed new trails in non-kinetic warfare, effectively ending speculation that the world’s lone superpower was asleep at the wheel as nations like China and Russia dashed ahead in the cyber realm. Now for the bad news: we’re screwed.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending days or weeks compromising dozens of Web sites and setting up your network of malicious redirects and then finding out that someone has screwed it all up by taking down one of your infected sites. Luckily, the crew behind the BlackHole exploit kit has solved that problem for its customers by including a new domain-generation algorithm that will help create new malicious sites as quickly as possible.