General: November 2007 Archives

US CERT has posted an alert about a zero day vulnerability in Quicktime

US-CERT is aware of a vulnerability in Apple QuickTime that may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial-of-service condition on an affected system.

Until a security fix becomes available, US-CERT encourages users and administrators to follow the Securing Your Web Browser document to help mitigate the security risk.

That seems about right. I just pushed the last security fix from Quicktime out to the first test group.

Last week, we received the draft results of our most recent audit. There were some interesting findings.

One of the findings said that we had too many disabled accounts. We have a lot of domain accounts for a company of our size. When we migrated from Lotus Notes to Exchange many years ago, the Exchange administrator created accounts in AD for generic mailboxes. When we started using unified messaging (where your voicemail is delivered to your inbox as a WAV file) that led to domain accounts being created for voicemail storage. When we implemented Sharepoint, the admin said we needed AD accounts for every entity that needed to to exist in the phone book. So accounts were created for conference rooms and other things needing to appear in the phonebook.

Most of these accounts would never actually be logged into. The generic mailboxes could be accessed by assigning Exchange permissions on the mailbox. The voicemail boxes were accessed either through assigning exchange permission or accessing messages through the phone. The accounts to get things into the phone directory didn't need to be logged into either. So the accounts were disabled.

That's why we have so many domain accounts that are disabled. According to the responsible system administrators, the accounts are necessary. It still seems kind of funny to have domain accounts for the mens and womens restroom. If the powers that be want those rooms listed in the company phone directory, that is the way it has to be.

Sharktank had a funny entry about computer naming disasters.

The company's initials are THS, so the rebuilt servers get names such as THSad1 and THSad2. That makes it easier to find the right server when browsing the network.

But the day after the new e-mail server goes live, fish's own in-box is flooded -- and all the messages ask the same question.

"The users' mail clients announced the new server name in a pop-up before allowing them to connect," says fish. "In came the wave of e-mails asking why the new server was named 'the sex change.'

We had the same thing happen to us although we noticed the problem before the server went production and got it fixed. We thought it was kind of funny that the server was going to be known as "empty sex" but the director put a stop to that. :)

The Taipei Times is reporting:

Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc

Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif

The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner's knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org.

The affected hard discs are Maxtor Basics 500G discs.

I pushed the Cisco VPN client to the the department test group. This means that the 5.0.2 beta client that I've been waiting on will be released on Monday. ;)

Thus far I haven't had the adoption rate I would have hoped for, but this is a Holiday weekend.
Only a few problems this far:
1. The new profile is set to UDP, a user had an issue because of their dlink router. We had to go in and set it to TCP for it to work.
2. A permissions error during the install when it tried to modify the MTU setting.
3. User not understanding the instructions while upgrading the vpn client while connected through the vpn.
4. User created shortcuts not being removed when old version is uninstalled. The old version went in a custom location, the new version is going to the default location.

No major disasters which is a good thing.

Ugh, another Quicktime update.