Firefox spoofing flaw reported

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is vulnerable to spoofing attacks, according to an Israeli security researcher. Aviv Raff reported on his blog on Wednesday that Mozilla Firefox v2.0.0.11 allows information presented in a basic authentication dialogue box to be spoofed, opening up the possibility of users being redirected to a malicious website. Earlier versions of the browser may also be affected.

According to Raff, when a web server returns a 401 status code, it causes Firefox to display an authentication dialogue box. The 401 status code is returned by the web server when it recognises that the HTTP data stream sent by a browser or bot is correct, but access to the URL requires further user authentication.

The authentication dialogue box displays the server URL in what is called the WWW-Authenticate header field. This URL is in part defined by the realm value and, according to Raff, it is possible for an attacker to create a specially crafted realm value that will look as if the authentication dialogue came from a trusted website. This is due to Firefox failing to sanitise single quotes and spaces in the WWW-Authenticate header field, after a legitimate realm value enclosed in double quotes has been given.

At least two possible attack vectors are opened by this reported flaw, according to Raff. Man-in-the-middle attackers could create a web page with a link to a trusted website such as a bank. When a victim clicks on the link on the malicious page, the trusted web page would be opened in a new window. A script would be executed to redirect the newly opened window to the attacker’s web server, allowing username and password details to be compromised.

Alternatively, an attacker could embed an image in an email or web page which, when clicked on, would return a specially crafted dialogue login from the attacker’s web server, again allowing authentication details to be compromised.

President of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot, told ZDNet.co.uk that Mozilla is in the process of investigating the report, and so could not comment further at this time.

“We take security seriously,” said Nitot. “We are taking this report seriously, and are investigating.”

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Computer security--Take Care When Downloading and Installing Programs

When you buy an appliance, you give little thought to it doing you or your house any harm. Why? Because there are organizations like Undearwriters Laboratories that set standards and certify products. When you see a certifier’s label, you have more confidence that a product will be safer than a competing product that does not carry the same label. You’re willing to accept the risk because you believe the product has met some standards and has been certified by a respected authority.
Unfortunately, the Internet is not the same. There are neither standards nor many certification organizations. Anyone who writes a program can distribute it through any means available, such as through the web or by sending you a copy. Speaking of that, have you ever received a CD-ROM in the mail? How do you know that it contains what the label says? The answer is: you don’t know. More importantly, it’s difficult to know.


No matter how you acquire a program, it runs on your computer at the mercy of the program’s author. Anything, any operation, any task that you can do, this program can also do. If you’re allowed to remove any file, the program can too. If you can send email, the program can too. If you can install or remove a program, the program can too. Anything you can do, the intruder can do also, through the program you’ve just installed and run.
Sometimes there’s no explanation of what a program is supposed to do or what it actually does. There may be no user’s guide. There may be no way to contact the author. You’re on your own, trying to weigh a program’s benefits against the risk of the harm that it might cause.
What’s the problem you’re trying to solve here? You are trying to determine if the program you’ve just found satisfies your needs (say it provides a service that you want or you’re just experimenting) without causing harm to your computer and ultimately the information you have on the computer. How do you decide if a program is what it says it is? How do you gauge the risk to you and your computer by running this program?
You address these same risk issues when you purchase an appliance; you may just not have realized that’s what you were doing. When you make that purchase, you buy from either a local store you know or a national chain with an established reputation. If there’s a problem with your purchase, you can take it back to the store and exchange it or get your money back. If it causes you harm, you can seek relief through the legal system. The reputation of the merchant, the refund/return policy, and the availability of the legal system reduce your risk to a point where you make the purchase.

Apply these same practices when you buy a program. You should

* Learn as much as you can about the product and what it does before you purchase it.
* Understand the refund/return policy before you make your purchase.
* Buy from a local store that you already know or a national chain with an established reputation.
Presently, it is not as clear what the legal system’s role is for a program that causes harm or does not work as advertised. In the meantime, the LUB practices are a good first step.
Today’s Internet has a feature that standard products don’t have, or at least have but to a lesser extent. This feature is free programs. There is a multitude of free programs available for all types of systems, with more available each day. The challenge is to decide which programs deserve your confidence and are, therefore, worth the risk of installing and running on your home computer.
So then, how do you decide if a program is worth it? To decide if you should install and run a program on your home computer, follow these steps:
1. The Do test: What does the program do? You should be able to read a clear description of what the program does. This description could be on the web site where you can download it or on the CD-ROM you use to install it. You need to realize that that if the program was written with malicious intent, the author/intruder isn’t going to tell you that the program will harm your system. They will probably try to mislead you. So, learn what you can, but consider the source and consider whether you can trust that information.
2. The Changes test: What files are installed and what other changes are made on your system when you install and run the program? Again, to do this test, you may have to ask the author/intruder how their program changes your system. Consider the source.
3. The Author test: Who is the author? (Can you use email, telephone, letter, or some other means to contact them?) Once you get this information, use it to try to contact them to verify that the contact information works. Your interactions with them may give you more clues about the program and its potential effects on your computer and you.
4. The Learn test: Has anybody else used this program, and what can you learn from him or her? Try some Internet searches using your web browser. Somebody has probably used this program before you, so learn what you can before you install it.

If you can’t determine these things – the DCAL tests for short – about the program you’d like to install, then strongly consider whether it’s worth the risk. Only you can decide what’s best. Whatever you do, be prepared to rebuild your computer from scratch in case the program goes awry and destroys it. Task 5 - Make Backups of Important Files and Folders tells you how to make a copy of your important information should you need it.
Your anti-virus program prevents some of the problems caused by downloading and installing programs. However, you need to remember that there’s a lag between recognizing a virus and when your computer also knows about it. Even if that nifty program you’ve just downloaded doesn’t contain a virus, it may behave in an unexpected way. You should continue to exercise care and do your homework when downloading, installing, and running new programs.

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Tools to Track & Recover Your Stolen Laptop

Off late, in coffee shops, college campuses, hotel lobbies and even in cars, laptops and notebook computers are being targeted by criminals. And these incidents are increasing at an alarming rate.[sintuhack].As per FBI, 97% of the stolen laptops are never recovered. That is a staggering stat. But don’t worry, we can increase the odds of recovering / tracking your stolen laptop and that too for FREE![sintuhack]

Ways to Track and Recover your Stolen Laptop

1. Track your Stolen laptop with Adeona

Adeona from University of Washington provides an open source, [sintuhack].free and completely non-proprietary way to track your stolen laptop. [sintuhack].You can install Adeona on your laptop and go as there’s no need to rely on a single third party! What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can be rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop. You can read the detailed article on Adeona here

.[sintuhack].
2. Locate your laptop with LocateMyLaptop.com

LocateMyLaptop is a free service that offers a stealthy app on your laptop which reports its position whenever the computer is connected to the Internet.[sintuhack]. If it’s lost or stolen, you can issue a self-destruct command to erase all the data on the hard drive – but that requires upgrading to the Platinum Plan, which costs $3/month. But you do not need to pay anything until the disaster strikes. this is because, tracking of laptop is FREE, and you can upgrade to the platinum service only if your laptop gets stolen.

3. Browser Plugin to Track your stolen Laptop – Loki[sintuhack].

Loki is basically a service which can add location of users to any website.[sintuhack]. But it can be tweaked in such a way that you can log directly into Loki to see your laptop’s location on a map, or enable “sharing” – which blasts your location to a public Web page, to Twitter, Facebook, or a handful of other services.[sintuhack]. Only concern is, Loki is not always reliable as it sometimes fails to update the public page with laptop’s location.[sintuhack]. This issue is seen even when Loki browser plugin on the laptop knew where it is.[sintuhack]. Hopefully this issue should be fixed by the next release.[sintuhack]

4. Locate your stolen Laptop with LocatePC

LocatePC is FREE software which lets you track and finally get back your stolen computer or laptop back to you.[sintuhack]. LocatePC sends you a secret email message from your stolen computer or laptop with some crucial information. But again, we will be hoping that the thief will connect the laptop to the internet before formatting. Still, something is better than nothing right?[sintuhack]

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computer security

Computer security is the process of preventing and detecting unauthorized use of your computer. Prevention measures help you to stop unauthorized users (also known as "intruders") from accessing any part of your computer system. Detection helps you to determine whether or not someone attempted to break into your system, if they were successful, and what they may have done.

We use computers for everything from banking and investing to shopping and communicating with others through email or chat programs. Although you may not consider your communications "top secret," you probably do not want strangers reading your email, using your computer to attack other systems, sending forged email from your computer, or examining personal information stored on your computer (such as financial statements).
   Intruders (also referred to as hackers, attackers, or crackers) may not care about your identity. Often they want to gain control of your computer so they can use it to launch attacks on other computer systems.

Having control of your computer gives them the ability to hide their true location as they launch attacks, often against high-profile computer systems such as government or financial systems. Even if you have a computer connected to the Internet only to play the latest games or to send email to friends and family, your computer may be a target.

Intruders may be able to watch all your actions on the computer, or cause damage to your computer by reformatting your hard drive or changing your data.

Unfortunately, intruders are always discovering new vulnerabilities (informally called "holes") to exploit in computer software. The complexity of software makes it increasingly difficult to thoroughly test the security of computer systems.

Also, some software applications have default settings that allow other users to access your computer unless you change the settings to be more secure. Examples include chat programs that let outsiders execute commands on your computer or web browsers that could allow someone to place harmful programs on your computer that run when you click on them.

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Remove virus – Trojan Horse Sheur2

The Trojan Horse Sheur2 is a dangerous and harmful Trojan that infects Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows Vista, Windows 2000 computers. If your computer constantly raises speaker beep sounds, shows “Blue Screen” and reports that the error is produced by missing dll’s, registry keys, and Windows files, or your pop-up blocker is unable to block the pornographic and gambling related bulk popups then you are sure to have Trojan Horse Sheur2 on your computer.

The Trojan Horse Sheur2 is not just one computer infection. It comes in various forms and related infections. Some related infections are: SHeur2.hsf, SHeur2.FO, SHeur2, SHeur2.AS, SHeur2.MR, SHeur2.ISU, SHeur2.BBJ, sheur2.hsd, and SHeur2.CFT

SHeur enters your computer through backdoor without your knowledge. It usually gets into your computer due to browser security holes on your computer or if you visit questionable websites such as gambling, pornography, and hacking related websites.
Once installed on your computer, it hides itself on your computer as a legal software and the will start performing its various annoyances.

It drops malicious code to your local or network computer, disables the firewall and antivirus software configured on your computer, redirects your web browser to malicious websites, downloads malicious code, slowdowns the performance of your computer considerably, slowdowns Internet connection, and forwards passwords, login names and other confidential private information from your computer to remote computers.
How To Remove Trojan Horse Sheur2

You can remove SHeur2 Trojan using and automatic removal tool or manually. To remove it manually, you need to:

1.    Restart you computer Safe Mode.
2.    Open Internet Explorer and clean browser history and temporary internet files.
3.    Remove startup items.
4.    Remove Registry entries related to SHeur2
5.    Reboot your computer.

If the Trojan is still there you can try performing a System Restore to remove it. It is very difficult to remove SHeur2 manually because it re-installs itself if you have not completely removed its presence from your computer. Also it requires an expertise to handle system registry else you may end up in damaging your computer even more than it is damaged by this Trojan. It is therefore strongly recommended to use an automatic trojan Sheur removal tool to get rid of this virus from your computer

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Document Viruses

Document or “macro” viruses take advantage of macros – commands that are embedded in fi les and run automatically.

Many applications, such as word processing and spreadsheet programs, use macros.
A macro virus is a macro program that can copy itself and spread from one file to
another. If you open a file that contains a macro virus, the virus copies itself into the
application’s startup files. The computer is now infected.

When you next open a file using the same application, the virus infects that file. If your
computer is on a network, the infection can spread rapidly: when you send an infected
file to someone else, they can become infected too. A malicious macro can also make
changes to your documents or settings.

Macro viruses infect files used in most offices and some can infect several file types,
such as Word and Excel files. They can also spread to any platform on which their host
application runs.

Macro viruses first appeared in the mid-1990s and rapidly became the most serious
virus threat of that time. Few viruses of this type are seen now

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Denial of Service attack (DoS)

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack prevents users from accessing a computer or website.

In a DoS attack, a hacker attempts to overload or shut down a computer, so that
legitimate users can no longer access it. Typical DoS attacks target web servers
and aim to make websites unavailable. No data is stolen or compromised, but the
interruption to the service can be costly for a company.

The most common type of DoS attack involves sending more traffic to a computer than
it can handle. Rudimentary methods include sending outsized data packets or sending
email attachments with names that are longer than permitted by the mail programs.[sintuhack]

An attack can also exploit the way that a “session” of communications is established
when a user first contacts the computer. If the hacker sends many requests for a
connection rapidly and then fails to respond to the reply, the bogus requests are left in
a buffer for a while. Genuine users’ requests cannot be processed, so that they can’t
contact the computer.[sintuhack]

Another method is to send an “IP ping” message (message requiring a response from
other computers) that appears to come from the victim’s computer. The message goes
out to a large number of computers, which all try to respond. The victim is flooded with
replies and the computer can no longer handle genuine traffic.[sintuhack]

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack uses numerous computers to launch the attack. Typically, hackers use a virus or Trojan to open a “back door” on other people’s
computers and take control of them. These “zombie” computers can be used to launch
a coordinated denial-of-service attack.[sintuhack]

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Browser Hijackers

Browser hijackers change the default home and search pages in your
internet browser.

Some websites run a script that changes the settings in your browser without your
permission. This hijacker can add shortcuts to your “Favorites” folder or, more seriously,
can change the page that is first displayed when you open the browser.

You may find that you cannot change your browser’s start page back to your chosen
site. Some hijackers edit the Windows registry so that the hijacked settings are restored
every time you restart your computer. Others remove options from the browser’s tools
menu, so that you can’t reset the start page.

In every case, the intention is the same: to force you to visit a website. This inflates
the number of “hits” and the site’s ranking with search engines, which boosts the
advertising revenue that the site can earn.

Browser hijackers can be very tenacious. Some can be removed automatically by
security software. Others may need to be removed manually. In some cases, it is easier
to restore the computer to an earlier state or reinstall the operating system.Browser hijackers change the default home and search pages in your
internet browser.

Some websites run a script that changes the settings in your browser without your
permission. This hijacker can add shortcuts to your “Favorites” folder or, more seriously,
can change the page that is first displayed when you open the browser.

You may find that you cannot change your browser’s start page back to your chosen
site. Some hijackers edit the Windows registry so that the hijacked settings are restored
every time you restart your computer. Others remove options from the browser’s tools
menu, so that you can’t reset the start page.

In every case, the intention is the same: to force you to visit a website. This inflates
the number of “hits” and the site’s ranking with search engines, which boosts the
advertising revenue that the site can earn.

Browser hijackers can be very tenacious. Some can be removed automatically by
security software. Others may need to be removed manually. In some cases, it is easier
to restore the computer to an earlier state or reinstall the operating system.Browser hijackers change the default home and search pages in your
internet browser.

Some websites run a script that changes the settings in your browser without your
permission. This hijacker can add shortcuts to your “Favorites” folder or, more seriously,
can change the page that is first displayed when you open the browser.

You may find that you cannot change your browser’s start page back to your chosen
site. Some hijackers edit the Windows registry so that the hijacked settings are restored
every time you restart your computer. Others remove options from the browser’s tools
menu, so that you can’t reset the start page.

In every case, the intention is the same: to force you to visit a website. This inflates
the number of “hits” and the site’s ranking with search engines, which boosts the
advertising revenue that the site can earn.

Browser hijackers can be very tenacious. Some can be removed automatically by
security software. Others may need to be removed manually. In some cases, it is easier
to restore the computer to an earlier state or reinstall the operating system.

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Bluesnarfing---security threat

 Bluesnarfing[sintuhack]
Bluesnarfing is the theft of data from a Bluetooth phone.Like Bluejacking, Bluesnarfing depends on the ability of Bluetooth-enabled devices to detect and contact others nearby.[sintuhack].In theory, a Bluetooth user running the right software on their laptop can discover a
nearby phone, connect to it without your confirmation, and download your phonebook,[sintuhack],
pictures of contacts and calendar.Your mobile phone’s serial number can also be downloaded and used to clone the phone.[sintuhack],A great euphonious in every box
You should turn off Bluetooth or set it to “undiscoverable”.[sintuhack] The undiscoverable setting
allows you to continue using Bluetooth products like headsets, but means that your
phone is not visible to others.[sintuhack]

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HOW to Track and Recover Your Lost/Stolen iPhone

iPhone is the world’s best smart phone available today without any doubt. People carry their phones everywhere they go, and hence there is always a chance of them forgetting their iPhone somewhere or the iPhone getting stolen. Learn how to track, message, erase and recover your lost or stolen iPhone.

1. Track your iPhone via MobileMe

Apple has announced a new service called Find My iPhone that will allow iPhone owners to remotely locate their lost or stolen iPhones using the iPhone’s GPS. The service will be available as part of Apple’s MobileMe online subscription service.

Find My iPhone will pinpoint the iPhone’s current location using Google Maps and let owners send and display a message on the iPhone even if it’s locked, presumably to provide information on how to return the phone to the finder of the phone.

2. iPhone anti-theft solution – iLocalis
iLocalis has the following uses-

    * Never lose you iPhone: If it is missing just log onto the iLocalis site and you’ll know where it was located last.
    * Retrieve a stolen iPhone: If your iPhone is stolen you can log into the site and check out where it’s at. Extra features built into iLocalis allow you to send text messages or make calls on your iPhone when you don’t even have it with you. If you iPhone is stolen log in and send yourself a text message. If the thief changed the sim card you’ll have their phone number!
    * Allow your family and friends to know where you are: iLocalis will send a message to your friends when you are near by. You can also set it up to allow your friends to locate you. If your friend also has iLocalis you can send messages to each other for free. No txt messaging charges.
    * iLocalis can also be used for a business that needs location services for their employees. Employees carrying iPhones with iLocalis can be tracked via the web site easily.

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