Posts Tagged ‘mac osx’

Safari security holes

Accor­ding to a ZDNet news article, Apple has release a patch to correct two secu­rity vul­ne­ra­bi­li­ties to it’s Safari Browser.

These flaws, which impac­ted Win­dows and Mac OsX sys­tems could lead to cross-site scrip­ting and Remote code exe­cu­tion attacks.

To define these terms:

Accor­ding to cgisecurity.com:

Cross site scrip­ting (also known as XSS) occurs when a web appli­ca­tion gathers mali­cious data from a user. The data is usually gathe­red in the form of a hyper­link which con­tains mali­cious con­tent within it. The user will most likely click on this link from another web­site, ins­tant mes­sage, or simply just rea­ding a web board or email mes­sage. Usually the attac­ker will encode the mali­cious por­tion of the link to the site in HEX (or other enco­ding methods) so the request is less sus­pi­cious loo­king to the user when clic­ked on. After the data is collec­ted by the web appli­ca­tion, it crea­tes an out­put page for the user con­tai­ning the mali­cious data that was ori­gi­nally sent to it, but in a man­ner to make it appear as valid con­tent from the web­site. Many popu­lar guest­book and forum pro­grams allow users to sub­mit posts with html and javasc­ript embed­ded in them. If for exam­ple I was log­ged in as “john” and read a mes­sage by “joe” that con­tai­ned mali­cious javasc­ript in it, then it may be pos­si­ble for “joe” to hijack my ses­sion just by rea­ding his bulle­tin board post. Further details on how attacks like this are accom­plished via “coo­kie theft” are explai­ned in detail below.

From wikipedia.com

The abi­lity to trig­ger arbi­trary code exe­cu­tion from one machine on another is often refe­rred to as remote code exe­cu­tion.  In com­pu­ter secu­rity, arbi­trary code exe­cu­tion is used to desc­ribe an attacker’s abi­lity to exe­cute any com­mands of the attacker’s choice on a tar­get machine or in a tar­get pro­cess. It is com­monly used in arbi­trary code exe­cu­tion vul­ne­ra­bi­lity to desc­ribe a soft­ware bug that gives an attac­ker a way to exe­cute arbi­trary code. A pro­gram that is desig­ned to exploit such a vul­ne­ra­bi­lity is called an arbi­trary code exe­cu­tion exploit. Most of these vul­ne­ra­bi­li­ties allow the exe­cu­tion of machine code and most exploits the­re­fore inject and exe­cute shell­code to give an attac­ker an easy way to manually run arbi­trary commands.

Please remem­ber, no mat­ter what anyone says, no ope­ra­ting sys­tem is 100% safe as long as it touches the internet.

How hot is your Laptop?

How many rea­ders have a lap­top? I would say alot, they are much chea­per and much more func­tio­nal then the lap­tops of the old days.  Some are almost as cheap as a desk­top.  That cou­pled with how easy a wire­less net­work is to set up and how many public area offer free WiFi for on the road, makes a lap­top a good invest­ment now a days.

But have you tried to ever sit with one on your lap some­ti­mes?  Well ima­gine the tem­pe­ra­ture inside the case and ima­ging what it is doing to your CPU(s).

For those that may not be aware of what high tem­pe­ra­tu­res can do, it cause cause hard­ware pro­blems or even cause soft­ware to freeze up and crash.

To see the CPU tem­pe­ra­ture, there is a few free pro­grams out there.  The first is Real Temp.  It is a small down­load that you ins­tall and bam you see the temp of your Intel processor(s).  It does show a lot of infor­ma­tion, but for most users you will need only the mini­mum and maxi­mum temp, the current CPU load, and the ther­mal indi­ca­tors.  Another I have used in the past is Speed­Fan.  I per­so­nally like Speed­Fan bet­ter, I find it gives bet­ter infor­ma­tion as well as infor­ma­tion con­cer­ning S.M.A.R.T. hard drives.

For Macs, though I can test it, there is a uti­lity for Mac OSX — smcFanControl2.  If you are a Mac user and try this, please let me know how it works.

For the heat to your legs, I recom­mend get­ting a lap­top cushion you can find almost anywhere, or I have a bel­kin base that actually has a fan that runs cold air up at the bot­tom of your lap­top to cool it down. My base usually drops the CPU temp about 5–6 degrees Cel­sius.  I highly recom­mend loo­king for one.