CA issues false warning on JavaScript apps
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Pete Tong on New Year's eve A mis-firing anti-virus update from CA issued on Monday wrongly identified legitimate JavaScript files as a virus.â¦
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JavaScript development goes to the dogs What you can - and cannot do - with your software is often determined by the code owner's license. From not using open source APIs with closed-source digital rights management (DRM) to being barred from fiddling with Windows source code, we've seen it all.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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In a new blog post Richard Thomas takes a deeper look (well continues his ) at the performance of the Zend_Loader component of the Zend Framework.   When you use Zend_Loader your files are wrapped in conditional statements. These statements prevent APC and all other cache/accelerator programs to have problems properly caching your file. [...] Now here is the catch-22. Depending on the size of your application and how often different classes are used you can run into problems.   His result doesn't have much to do with the component, though - he points out that conditionals of any type can slow things down in an application and that "benchmarking is your friend".
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Collateral damage A faulty signature update to CA's antivirus software created headaches for sys admins last week after the software falsely identified a Windows 2003 component as malware.â¦
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Over on Dynamically Typed there is a two posting series on efforts to get javascript to talk to PHP effectively.
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Flaw in the way the Net phone software handles Web links could enable an attacker to launch arbitrary code on some Macs.
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As reported here on Secunia (as discovered by shinnai), there's a code execution vulnerability in PHP's glob function:    The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of an uninitialized structure inside the "glob()" function. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary code, which may lead to security restrictions (e.g. the "disable_functions" directive) being bypassed.   The vulnerability is confirmed in the 5.2.3 win32 installer. Other versions may also be affected.    The issue is marked as "less critical" and can be avoided easily by only allowing trusted users the correct permissions to execute PHP code on the server.
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com December 8, 2004, 4:50 PM PT. A function built into all major browsers could be co-opted by attackers to fool Web site visitors into surrendering sensitive information, a security firm warned on Wednesday.
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Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 do not properly handle JavaScript "onUnload" events and can be tricked into taking a user to the wrong URL, according to security researcher Michal Zalewski.
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Blog: Feature designed to dial Web page phone numbers is subject to cross-site scripting attack.
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The &quot;highly criticial&quot; vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 5.01, 5.5, and 6 on fully patched PCs running either Windows XP SP1 or the newer SP2.
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(InfoWorld) - CA Inc. caused some headaches this week after its antivirus software inadvertently flagged part of the Windows OS as malware. The SANS Internet Storm CenterÂ reported the problem Friday saying that an overnight update to CA's eTrust Antivirus signatures had caused the software to flag a security-related process in Windows as malicious. The faulty update caused some Windows 2003 servers to crash and become unusable, SANS said. The problem was that eTrust Antivirus was mistakenly flagging the Windows Lsass.exe process, said Bob Gordon, a CA spokesman. "CA quickly discovered and fixed an issue which temporarily caused some customers to detect a problem in their Lsass.exe files," he said in an e-mail. According to Gordon, it took CA less than seven hours to fix the mix-up. The problem was introduced in the 30.3.3054 update, released at 2:53 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) and fixed in the 30.3.3056 update, which was issued at 9:34 a.m. EST.Â CA's latest updatesÂ  are online. The Lsass.exe process is part of Windows' security mechanism. So users who had set their eTrust Antivirus to automatically remove malicious software may have found that their systems crashed and were unable to boot up Windows once Lsass.exe was removed. CA offers online guidance for users who have been experiencing crashes as a result of the buggy update. Antivirus software like CA's uses digital fingerprints, called signatures, to identify malicious software. In this case, eTrust Antivirus apparently mistook Lsass.exe for the Win32/Lassrv.B virus. It is not unheard of for signature files to mistakenly identify legitimate software as malware, but it is remarkable that CA's software made the mistake with a well-known Windows component, according to Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at SANS. CA should have been able to detect the problem in its quality-assurance testing, he said. The mixup apparently did not disrupt a large number of users, but it still reflects poorly on vendors like CA, Ullrich said. "It's another loss in trust toward the antivirus business," he said. "It tells you that the antivirus vendors don't do the testing."
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In response to this previous post, Ben Ramsey has relayed some of this thoughts on the benchmarks that were done by Jonathan Street comparing functions and their aliases:   Mmy first reaction was something like: "Egads! These benchmarks are stupid and misleading! These functions are simply aliases of each other. There should be no discernible difference, and any buffoon should realize this fallacy!" This was before I clicked through from PHPDeveloper.org to read his post.   After reading his data and going on to the Better Benchmarks post that followed it, he found that most of the results of additional testing came out negligible and that there was almost no difference between the two.    Ben illustrates the proof of this with a few lines pasted from the "ext/standard/basic_functions.c" in PHP's source showing that the code is shared via a PHP_FALIAS function call.
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Symantec&#160;is warning users of the RealPlayer media software to be extra careful while surfing the Web.On Wednesday, the company&#39;s Symantec Security Response team uncovered new&#160;attack code that affects the RealPlayer&#160;11 beta and RealPlayer 10.5 software on the Windows platform, according to Ben Greenbaum, a senior manager with the group. By late Wednesday, Symantec had tested the attack and confirmed that it worked on the English version of Windows XP Service Pack 1 running Internet Explorer 6. Tests for the more-recent XP service pack 2 and IE 7 browser were ongoing.For the attack to work, the criminal would have to trick the victim into playing a maliciously encoded Web page. The flaw lies in a browser helper object, software that RealPlayer uses to help users who are experiencing technical difficulties.Once the exploit is run on the victim&#39;s machine, the attacker can download and install whatever software he wants, Greenbaum said.So far, Symantec has just seen the one sample of the attack code, submitted by a customer in the U.S., but Greenbaum expects it to soon become more widespread. Symantec has not yet seen the code posted to public hacker forums, he added.Symantec&#39;s products are now protecting its customers from the attack, but other users can protect themselves by disabling JavaScript and ActiveX in their browsers and by being careful about the sites they visit, Greenbaum said.Greenbaum did not know whether the flaw also exists on Linux and Mac OS versions of RealPlayer, but he said that even if they were vulnerable, the attack code that Symantec has seen would probably need to be rewritten for those platforms.RealPlayer&#39;s maker, RealNetworks, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this issue.
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A security issue has been discovered in a common feature included in several Web browsers, including Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Camino.
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More anti-virus false alarm madness A dodgy anti-virus update from McAfee on Wednesday wrongly identified legitimate JavaScript files as a virus in the second such screw-up by a major security vendor in less than a week.â¦
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Worried about spyware? spam? "spim"? AOL wants to set your mind at rest. Also: Putting patches in place.