Internet Security and Programming

On the mend
Computer systems at three major London hospitals are largely back online on Friday morning, three days after a major computer virus outbreak forced staff to disconnect the network.…

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Earlier this year, Security Fix criticizedApple for making iPhone users wait for security updates that Apple had fixed in its other products four months earlier. Now, it appears that iPhone users may have received a patch for a critical security hole four months before Apple fixed the flaw in its other products. Taking a look at the vulnerability summary from the update Apple released last week to fix critical vulnerabilities in Mac and Windows versions of its Safari browser, we can see that Apple corrected a serious flaw in WebKit, the rendering engine used by Safari on Mac OS X, Windows and the iPhone: WebKit CVE-ID: CVE-2008-2303 Available for: Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X v10.5.5, Windows XP or Vista Impact: Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution Description: A signedness issue in Safari’s handling of JavaScript array indices may

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One of the casualties from the unplugging of McColo Corp. is fraudcrew.com, a Web service that offered paying customers the ability to hide their identities online by routing their traffic through computers controlled by others. Fraudcrew, which has not been charged with any crime, offered subscribers a point-and-click way to mask the source of their Internet connections, so that Web sites could not tell the true location of visitors using the service. The site was advertised heavily on Russian online forums catering to computer hacking and identity theft. There are a number of services like those offered by Fraudcrew (Security Fix profiled another one earlier this year) that not only aid in hiding one’s identity online, but could also defeat security measures put in place by financial institutions. Many online banks will check to see whether the customer’s Internet address is coming from a location already associated with the customer’s

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