Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

So here we sit, 5-months after the consumer launch of Vista and 7-months after the commercial/business launch. Seeing that security is an important aspect in many people’s lives, Jeff Jones decided to see how Vista stacked up more than 6-months after its release. Before I get into anything it is probably important to note that Jeff is the Security Strategy Director for Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, which might affect how you look at these results.

The chart below shows the number of high severity vulnerabilities found in some common operating systems during the first 6-months of the release. Jeff decided to not include the vulnerabilities for third-party applications that are commonly included with Linux, such as OpenOffice and Gimp. Here are the results:

Here is a look at the first 6-months of the operating systems in the chart:

• Vista: 12 vulnerabilities fixed and 10 were high severity.
• XP: 36 vulnerabilities fixed and 23 were high severity.
• Red Hat Enterprise: 214 vulnerabilities fixed and 62 were high severity.
• Ubuntu 6.06: 74 vulnerabilities fixed and 28 were high severity.
• Novell SLED10: 123 vulnerabilities fixed and 44 were high severity.
• Mac OS X 10.4: 60 vulnerabilities fixed and 18 were high severity.

While that chart flatters Vista for having just one high severity vulnerability unpatched, it also doesn’t tell the whole truth. At the end of the 6-month period in XP there were only three unpatched vulnerabilities (over all severities), Ubuntu had 11 unpatched, and Vista sits with 15 unpatched. So in terms of fixing the high severity vulnerabilities Microsoft is really on top of it, but what about the other 15 vulnerabilities that are still out there?

Not only that, but 5 of the 12 vulnerabilities that they fixed were for Internet Explorer, so anyone not using that as their browser is already a lot safer! Time to go get Firefox or Opera…

Another interesting fact is that over the last month 91% of our visitors have been using Windows. Breaking it down even further shows that only 15% are using Vista and 73% are using XP, which leads to another obvious question. Not enough people have made the upgrade to Vista yet, so why would the hardcore hackers target that operating system? At this point it isn’t really worth their time.

Source: PC World

Props to CoryC for the tip

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Beware, malware. The Windows AutoRun updates for Vista and XP SP3 that Microsoft released in February have so far proven successful in thwarting your file corrupting ways. Although Windows 7 was updated to disable AutoPlay within AutoRun for USB drives — freezing the ability for a virus to exploit it — the aforementioned versions had remained vulnerable up until right after January. Fast-forward to the period between February and May of this year, and the updates have reduced the number of incidents by 1.3 million compared to the three months prior for the supported Vista and XP builds. Amazingly, when stacked against May of last year, there was also a 68 percent decline in the amount of incidents reported across all builds of Windows using Microsoft’s Malicious Software Remove Tool. There’s another fancy graph after the break to help illustrate, and you’ll find two more along with a full breakdown by hitting the source link down under.

Continue reading Microsoft to malware: your AutoRunning days on Windows are numbered

Microsoft to malware: your AutoRunning days on Windows are numbered originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Jun 2011 21:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows only
One trend that I’ve noticed as bandwidth and hard drive storage space continues to grow is that sending CD/DVD’s over the Internet is becoming a preferred way for distributing media. These files are typically in an ISO or BIN/CUE format, which most people will then burn to a CD/DVD before using them. The good news is that you can easily save the time and money involved in doing this by using a free virtual drive application.

How do you mount an ISO image? It’s actually really simple if you have the right tools. What they do is take an ISO image, BIN/CUE file, or any other supported format and displays it as a virtual drive on your computer. The drive will look just like any other CD drive in Windows Explorer. One of the huge benefits of doing this is that reading/copying files from the “CD” in this way is much faster than using a physical CD-ROM drive.

There are several free applications floating around the Internet that can do this, but you should be aware that some of them (Daemon Tools, etc..) might install spyware/malware on your machine. Luckily there are three great freeware solutions that you can trust, and that’s what we’re going to cover today.

–Virtual CloneDrive (Homepage)–

If you want a no-frills solution for mounting images Virtual CloneDrive is what you’ll likely want to use. It supports all of the common image formats including ISO, BIN, and CDD, and is capable of mounting the last used image file upon startup. You can have up to 8 virtual drives at any one given time, but the nicest feature would be the fact that you can mount an image simply by double-clicking on the file.

–MagicISO (Homepage)–

MagicISO (commonly referred to as MagicDisc) can do everything that Virtual CloneDrive is capable of plus some. It supports up to 15 simultaneous virtual drives, can automatically mount the last used image file, compress ISO images (which really just converts it from an ISO image to UIF), and more. Plus you can create ISO images from a CD/DVD!

Here are some of the filetypes it supports when creating or mounting images:

• Creating: ISO, BIN/CUE, NRG, or UIF images from a CD/DVD
• Mounting: Not only does MagicISO support the ISO image format, but it also supports over two dozen other popular formats: UIF, BIN/CUE (CDRWin), IMA/IMG, CIF (Easy CD Creator), NRG (Nero Burning ROM), IMG/CCD (CloneCD), MDF/MDS (Fantom CD), VCD (Farstone Virtual Drive), FCD, LCD, NCD, GCD, VaporCD (Noum Vapor CDROM), P01/MD1/XA (Gear), VC4/000 (Virtual CD), VDI (Virtuo CD Manager), C2D (WinOnCD), BWI/BWT (BlinkWrite), CDI (DiscJuggler), TAO/DAO (Duplicator), and PDI (Instant Copy)

The only thing this seems to be missing is the easy double-click to mount an image file that Virtual CloneDrive supports. To mount a drive in MagicISO you’ll want to click on the System Tray icon, go to Virtual CD/DVD-ROM, hover over one of the virtual adrives, and then choose the “Mount” option.

–StarBurn (Homepage)–

You might recall us writing about StarBurn as a free CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning application, but it’s also capable of mounting an ISO image! Once you have the StarBurn software running you’ll notice that there is a StarPort option located on the toolbar (also in the Action menu), and clicking on that will initiate the StarPort wizard. From there you can mount or unmount an image file on a virtual drive.

If you’ve been wanting a nice freeware application for burning CD’s and DVD’s I highly recommend picking this up. The fact that it doubles as a virtual drive manager makes it extremely worthwhile.

Note: This software tries to change your browser’s homepage during the setup process, but getting around it is as simple as unchecking a box.

–Overview–

It’s good to know that you’ve got options available to you should you decide that you need a virtual drive management application. Each one of the free solutions I’ve mentioned above caters to a different type of need: Virtual CloneDrive is simple and intuitive, MagicISO is powerful and lets you create images from CD’s, and StarBurn doubles as a CD burning application. Pick the one that benefits you the most, but it’s not like you can’t easily download one of the other free alternatives if you don’t like how one of them handles.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft just wrapped up their annual meeting with financial analysts today where they disclosed that since the January launch of Vista, 60 million copies have been sold. To break it down, from January 30th to February 28th, 20 million copies of Windows Vista were sold. By mid-May, they had gotten to the 40 million mark, and between May and the end of June, another 20 million copies were sold.

Also at the meeting, Steve Ballmer said that by mid-2008, “There will be more PCs running Windows than automobiles at that point” as one billion people will be using Windows. At first, that thought was hard to fathom, but after thinking about it further, it makes sense. I’m sure many of you have multiple computers in your home. Do any of you have more computers than cars? We sure do – one car and four computers. And then there are all of the schools across the World with computer labs running Windows, which are also taken into account.

Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet also points out that Microsoft has doubled profit and nearly doubled revenue within the last five years, and they’ve returned more than $100 billion to their shareholders. These she says, are their bragging points. She also pointed out how Steve Ballmer “emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft now sees itself as an advertising company.” So apparently they’re going to be putting more focus and effort into advertising to compete with Google and Yahoo?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

The day after Vista was released to consumers, we presented you with a workaround that would allow you to postpone Vista activation for up to 120 days. Now there’s a new workaround that I think you’ll enjoy. I just got done going through a webcast with Brian Livingston from WindowsSecrets.com who introduced a new way of bypassing Windows Vista activation that, when used in conjunction with slmgr -rearm, can get you by with one year of activation . This trick uses a registry key called SkipRearm which Microsoft’s own TechNet document says:

All licensing and registry data related to activation is either removed or reset. Any grace period timers are reset as well.

So what’s the trick? It’s actually unbelievably easy…

—Extend Vista Activation To 120 Days—

First off, Vista gives you a 30–day grace period to activate Vista if you don’t enter in a product key during the installation process (just press Enter when asked for a key to bypass it). Then at the end of each month right when your grace period is about to end you can get an additional 30 days by using this small trick that was discovered about a month ago:

1. First you need to start a Command Prompt as an administrator. You can do this by clicking the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. You may also do this by finding the Command Prompt option located in your Accessories folder:
   
   If asked to approve a User Account Control prompt, please do so and provide an administrator password if needed.
    
2. At the prompt type the following command and press Enter:

   slmgr -rearm

   Every time you run this command it will add 30 days to the amount of time you have to activate Windows Vista. However, it will only be effective up to 3 times. If you add this time onto your original grace period it will give you 120 days total.
    
    

3. Reboot the PC to make the Vista activation deadline get pushed back.
   
    

—Extend Vista Activation Another 240 Days—

So what do you do after the 120 days is up? You could either purchase a product key from Microsoft, or use another method to extend the activation grace period another 8 times making it a total of 12 months (the initial 1 month + 3 months from above + 8 months = 1 year). Just like before, this uses the slmgr -rearm command, but it also uses a registry setting to allow the command to run another 8 times:

1. Click the Start button, type regedit into the Search box, and press Enter.
   
    
2. Find the SkipRearm key in the Windows Registry that you just opened which is located in the following “folder”:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ SL
   
    

3. Right-click on the SkipRearm and select Modify. Change the “Value Data” to any positive integer, such as 1. Press OK and close the Registry Editor.
   
    
4. Now you need to start a Command Prompt as an administrator. You can do this by clicking the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. You may also do this by finding the Command Prompt option located in your Accessories folder:
   
   If asked to approve a User Account Control prompt, please do so and provide an administrator password if needed.
    
5. At the prompt type the following command and press Enter:

   slmgr -rearm

   Every time you run this command it will add 30 days to the amount of time you have to activate Windows Vista. Each time you run this command it will reset the registry key you modified in Step 3 back to the original value of 0.
   
    

6. Reboot the PC to make the Vista activation deadline get pushed back.
   
   You can always use the command slmgr -xpr at a Command Prompt to have it show when Vista will expire to ensure that the trick has worked.
    
7. Every time you do the steps above it will essentially reset all activation information on your computer. You’re really starting from a clean slate each time (in terms of activation) which means you will need to repeat these steps every 30 days.

Note: All of my PC’s are legally activated so I didn’t try this trick out for myself.

We are in no way condoning piracy, but we wrote about this because it was something that seemed just too easy and only utilized tools already found in Vista. After watching the webcast I was shown just how easy it was to extend the deadline. This is still quite a pain though, because at the end of each month you’ll have to make sure to reset the activation system. Your calendar would look something like this:

• Start of month 1: Install Vista without a product key (do this by pressing Enter during the installation setup).
• End of months 1 to 3: Use the first set of steps outlined above to extend the activation grace period.
• End of months 4 to 11: Use the second set of steps outlined above to extend the activation grace period.
• End of month 12: Reinstall Vista.

This could really spell disaster for Microsoft because hackers will probably come out with some little program that will automatically extend the period every 30 days, and then it will prompt you to reboot your computer. It sounds so simple and it really is…I could whip up a quick program in just a few minutes that would do everything that you needed to.

The real worry for Microsoft comes when someone figures out where the slmgr limitation is stored. There is obviously something in Vista preventing a user from abusing the command more than what has already been demonstrated above. Once someone finds out what’s the limiting factor, there is going to be a whole can of worms opened up.

—Why can users postpone activation in the first place?—

Microsoft implemented a new Volume Licensing system in Windows Vista to hopefully stop widespread piracy that occurred with previous versions of Windows. In Windows XP Microsoft provided a single product key for corporations that wouldn’t require that Windows be activated at all. This caused a huge dilemma so Microsoft sought out another solution…and the result was Volume Licensing 2.0.

This new licensing system requires all computers be activated which can be an unweilding burden for administrators with 1000’s of computers to activate. Microsoft offers several different ways for these computers to be activated, but all of them are still time consuming. Therefore Microsoft implemented the command slmgr -rearm that would push back the activation period 30 days at a time for up to 120 days. That way administrators would be given more time to get all of their systems activated.

There is one small catch though, this was originally intended for business use but also worked on home versions of Vista. Since then Microsoft appears to have patched all retail versions of Vista Home, but it should still work for Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate since those were the intended operating systems. Of course, pirates would probably be downloading Vista illegally from torrents and they would undoubtedly go for the Ultimate edition since it packs the most value.

While this can easily be done, it is surely no fun having to watch what patches are being downloaded in your Windows Update…and using cracks created by anyone else but yourself is just asking for trouble. Who knows what information those cracks could be sending to some unknown source! Now I’m left wondering what kind of update Microsoft will push through to try and correct this issue.

Thanks to Brian Livingston for inviting us to be part of his demo!

Note: Our last post about Vista activation resulted in a lot of cracks being posted in the comments. Do not post any cracks, patches, or key generators in the comments as they will be removed.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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