A security expert who goes by the name of "Cupidon-3005" has uploaded proof-of–concept code for an exploit that can blue screen all versions of Windows. The most vulnerable, according to Microsoft, are Windows Domain Controllers.
Not only can an attacker blue screen your machines, it also opens the machines up to remote code execution.
"The vulnerability is inside an error-reporting function of the CIFS browser service module. The function gets a variable number of arguments as parameters. Those string arguments are pushed on the stack for processing. In some cases, some of the strings can be controlled by the attacker," a TechNet blog explained.
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/23/2011 at 1:18 PM0 comments
Doug asked you which pundits you can and cannot stand. Here's one reader's take:
It's been a while since I weighed in with any commentary, but your mention of Glen Beck just begged for me to write you.
I remember watching Beck when he was on CNN. My wife loved to watch the provocative stuff he would throw out there. On the other hand, I thought he was a delusional huckster, spinning Byzantine conspiracy theories and trying to get people alarmed about this doomsday or that.
My opinion hasn't changed. He's now on Fox, and he's just as delusional as ever, and just as prone to spouting his chalkboard lunacy, but now he's got a network that doesn't think he's too hot to handle. My time is worth something -- throwing it away to listen to the ranting of Beck is not on my To Do list.
Rush Limbaugh is certainly right up there in the pantheon of right-wing blowhards. Missing for the most part, but still as witchy as ever, Ann Coulter has her own corner of this market of ideas -- solidly stocked with her particular brand of hypocritical BS. Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Sean Hannity, the list just goes on and on.
Lest you think that I lean far left, I must comment about the more loony of the left-wing brigade. Of course, there's MSNBC's recently departed Keith Olbermann, who will apparently be re-surfacing on Connect TV. Still focusing on MSNBC, there's Chris Matthews, who almost sounds reasonable at times, and my favorite, Ed Schultz. These are just the commentators -- there are plenty of Democratic politicians who qualify for some sort of "living on the edge" award for their own hyperbolic remarks.
At bottom, I'm done with politics. I'm in my early sixties; I've been waiting my whole adult life to see some 'adults' in the political arena. I've been waiting since at least the Reagan administration to see some political commentators who behaved as adults. I have been disappointed at every turn. The problems that we faced in the early seventies were delayed, postponed and put off for decades, and now they're more intractable, more divisive and more lethal to those things we hold dear than they were when they were fresh and threatening so many years ago.
A pox on this whole crew. I can't change what's already been done, and have precious little likelihood of changing what's going to be done as time progresses. We'll rise or fall on the current of events, and I don't expect the 'hand at the rudder' to have much impact on how that turns out.
Does this sound cynical? You betcha, to quote Sarah Palin. My attitude has gone through a lot of changes since JFK gave his first inaugural speech. I don't think I'm alone in that loss of idealism. What a sad outcome...
-Dennis
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Posted by Doug Barney on 02/23/2011 at 1:18 PM4 comments
A Doug's Mailbag regular comments on the switching of IPv4 addresses to IPv6 addresses:
Like many organizations, my employer has plenty of IPv4 addresses -- for now (it's like the cell companies that hoard telephone numbers). That's really not the challenge, though. The challenge is all of the layers of network hardware and software which have to be IPv6-ready: firewalls, routers, servers. If you turn on IPv6 in an IPv4-dominant environment, you run into latency problems when the software searches for IPv6 traffic. This slows down performance on IPv4 devices -- so, until there is a 'critical mass' of IPv6 traffic, the temptation is to build IPv6-to-IPv4 'tunnels,' which just puts off the inevitable.
It will still take MONTHS or YEARS before enough people use IPv6 every day for the industry to step up to the plate and complete their conversion. Then it will be a mad-house.
-Marc
One reader calls Doug out on his PowerShell assumption:
Maybe I'm still living in the 20th century but your statement "And because many admins do everything through PowerShell anyway, the GUI isn't missed at all" certainly does not apply to my organization. If I wanted to be a script guru, I'd probably be running Linux. I started in Windows (many years ago), and still use Windows because of the GUI. It makes it simple to use and administer. I don't have time to figure out a script for every little thing I need to do in A/D or Exchange. I'm sure PowerShell has its place, and maybe our organization is just not large enough to appreciate it, but it seems MS is going backwards, not forwards in getting away from the GUI.
-Jim
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Posted by Doug Barney on 02/18/2011 at 1:18 PM0 comments
It has been such an interesting week in technology that even the mainstream media is taking notice of what we all do. Here's the rundown on the major doings:
Of course FaceBook, Twitter and Google still get all the credit for the Egyptian revolution. Wow, I'm not sure how the American Minutemen, the French in 1789, the Bolsheviks or the Indians (in India) did it without social media!
On a sad note, reports surfaced that one Steve Jobs is likely facing another bout of cancer, something I think we all assumed. This is his second round, so it is a tough slog. We just lost Ken Olsen, I'd really hate for Mr. Jobs to not be driving technology the way he has done so well his whole life. Proprietary? Yes? Elegant and stable? Double yes. Good luck, Mr. Jobs.
From time to time I make references to politics and self-important political pundits. I poke both sides. To be frank, my politics are scattered in a million directions. I am radical on both the left and the right. I'd put together Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Ronald Reagan, JFK and Ron Paul to create my ideal politician.
So that's why I happened to be watching Glen Beck the other day -- a man who has miraculously stopped crying every episonde. Glen seems to know everything, and now knows everything about Google. I agreed with a lot of what he said this week about the company being evil -- although he seems to think its motivations are political, whereas I believe they are economic.
Beck (with the help of a research staff that can obviously Google -- I mean search -- for Google misdeeds) laid out the exact same argument that I and others have for many a moon. Here's what I wrote a scant month ago.
Beck was not pleased with Google, as he put it, taking credit for the Mubarak overthrow. I think he said something like, "Do I want my search engine overthrowing governments? No, I want my search engine giving me search results."
I'm not sure Google really took more credit than what was due -- I think the press is responsible for blowing it out of proportion. But Beck, perhaps late to the party, attacked Google's problems with privacy invasion and highlighted former CEO Eric Schmidt's creepiest quotes, including a couple winners I had never heard before.
Love him or hate him, this is the first time I've heard a major network pundit make such an aggressive anti-Google argument.
Is Beck in the right (not politically but factually)? And who is your favorite and least favorite pundit? Even those that believe Ann Coulter was right, I mean correct, when she wanted more journalists jailed in Egypt are free to write [email protected].
Oh, and let's not forget, President Obama dined with tech heavyweights Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Larry Ellison, Cisco's John Chambers and the ailing (but hopefully on the mend) Steve Jobs. The pics make it look like it was fun.
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/18/2011 at 1:18 PM3 comments
Every month, usually before and after the first Tuesday of the month, I bring you news of the latest public Microsoft patches. But not all patches are so public. There are also so-called "silent patches" that Microsoft releases without detailing.
What Microsoft does, according to a Shavlik patch exec, is pretty normal. Microsoft sees various vulnerabilities, or variants, and rolls the fixes into its monthly patch batch without spelling out all the details. A variant is where a common flaw is analyzed by hackers, who then attack closely related (but not always fixed) flaws.
In fact, Shavlik likes this approach. Variants are cured, and IT isn't overwhelmed with a bazillion patches to install.
What say you? Do you need each and every detail of each patch? Say it, don't spray it at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/18/2011 at 1:18 PM1 comments
Two patches that shipped by Microsoft last month are apparently causing heartache for VMware customers. It seems the patches kill connections between VMware View Connection Servers and Windows 7, VMware charges.
Fortunately there are two fixes -- one a real fix and one a real kludge. The first is to install a patch from VMware for the View Client. That sounds like a fix. VMware offered another option: Uninstall the two Microsoft patches. I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of removing something designed to keep hackers from taking over my machine. Hey, maybe that's just me!
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/16/2011 at 1:18 PM2 comments
Readers chime in with their top choices for smartphones:
iPhone, but I also like the Samsung Focus running Windows Phone 7.
-Anonymous
It's BlackBerry! The reason is because of the BES, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which keeps my BlackBerry in sync with everything I keep in Outlook. If my employer didn't use Exchange and BES, I am not so sure I'd feel the same way. I have tried MS Exchange Active Sync and it does NOT keep as much information on my Apple iPad as BES does on my BlackBerry. Whether other e-mail clients would do better with ActiveSync I just don't know -- but guess what? I don't have to find out!
-Marc
Probably BlackBerry but Android is sooo good.
-Anonymous
Here's another reader's mistake in the IT realm:
I can laugh now but 10 years ago I was working on an upgrade to an extremely important database table and needed to refresh the data in the development version from the production table.
So I logged into the database, truncated the table and realized my mistake when I went to load the data -- I was logged onto the production database and not the development instance. The fault was entirely mine, but I think the creator of the database instances should share in some of it as he had used the same password for the owner's account for all three database instances (development, staging and production).
Luckily we were able to restore the data from the previous night's backup with minimal loss. And I convinced management to institute a policy of enforcing different passwords between database instances.
Lesson learned.
– Erik
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Posted by Doug Barney on 02/16/2011 at 1:18 PM1 comments
One of the problems with testing your app against multiple versions of IE is you need multiple machines to install and uninstall the various releases. That's because when you install a new IE it uninstalls the older one.
The answer according to Microsoft is simple: virtualize. In a recent white paper, Microsoft promotes its own pay-to-play solution, but most any good virt software will work.
Why the sudden push? IE 9 is now a release candidate and Microsoft wants the migration to be smooth and fast.
So far the reports on IE 9 are pretty good, but I'm not sure it is going to shift the market share scales.
There are two kinds of browser users: Some are loyal to their browser, be it Chrome, IE, FireFox, Safari, etc. Others switch based on the latest and greatest -- let's face it, browsers aren't exactly the toughest applications to learn!
What kind of browser user are you? Describe yourself at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/16/2011 at 1:18 PM4 comments
The notion of Autorun is a bit scary. Sure, it's convenient to have a CD or DVD start right up without having to go to the Start Menu and futz around. But what would happen if Autorun initiates bad code? It would be like that feeling one gets clicking on a malicious link -- a feeling of no control.
Fortunately Microsoft hasn't seen these attacks yet...but hackers would love Autorun because they don't have to trick anyone in clicking anything. They just have to somehow get their nasty software on a USB, DVD, CD or extended drive.
Microsoft has heard the fears, and just shipped an update that partially turns off Autorun. XP and Vista users will now be notified before Autorunning, but only for USB or extended drives. CDs and DVDs will still Autorun because presumably they were published by trustworthy vendors. Windows 7 came shipped with this fix.
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/16/2011 at 1:18 PM3 comments
Readers chime in with some boneheaded blunders made on the job:
Probably about the dumbest thing I have done as a user/manager happened years ago. I had several boxes of diskettes that needed to be erased. I was just about finished with the project, getting tired of messing with it and entered del *.* -- Oops! no A:\ - BIG mistake. Gone!!!! My entire Windows directory wiped clean. No backup!!
Live and learn!
-Vickie
I can admit it now, but about ten years ago when working at a hospital we were about to do some changes to the payroll database. The quickest way at the time was to FTP the database over the network. I was talking to a co-worker and instead of entering the FTP put command I typed in the FTP get command. This basically wiped out my database with a zero byte file.
Luckily it was a light day and after 4 hours of restore time from a DDS-2 tape we were back in business. I stressed the entire 4 hours and praying that it was a good tape.
-Alan
Centuries ago, when I was a gross tyro at PC security, I thought just blithely installing an anti-virus program would protect me. I didn't make time to learn about updates or doing regular scans. I thought it would be self-sufficiently omnipotent for eternally. I'm not sure if it even could be set to scan inserted floppies, so that never happened.
An equally goofy and careless customer sent me an infected floppy with the Chernobyl virus on it. That beast not only dismantled all the data on my hard disk, it somehow fried my chipset. Our local technologist couldn't even fire up ol' Bessie.
I was able to get the insurance company to agree it was an act of vandalism and did get a new PC out of it. Still, it was chastening and a reminder that nothing is really self-maintaining.
-Jon
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Posted by Doug Barney on 02/14/2011 at 1:18 PM4 comments
Many, particularly when it comes to client versions of Windows, wait for the first service pack before feeling it's safe to move.
Well, your wait is almost over. Service Pack 1 for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 is done and in the paws of OEMs. And if you're on TechNet or MSDN, you'll be able to download the pack this Wednesday.
So what's it all about? Not much for Windows 7 users besides a rollup of all previous fixes.
Windows Server 2008, on the other hand, gains a couple new virtual technologies.
One for Remote Desktop Services is called RemoteFX. In short, RemoteFX gives users connected to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) better graphics.
In other virt news, Hyper-V gains dynamic memory so that all your memory becomes part of one shared pool. The upshot gives users a more efficient use of memory and up to 40 percent VDI density.
Are you excited about Windows 7 now that the service pack is out? Tell me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/14/2011 at 1:18 PM1 comments
Get used to the name Satya Nadella. This native of India just took over Microsoft's Server and Tools division, which means he is in charge of the vast majority of enterprise products that includes all server apps and OSes, Visual Studio, Systems Center and Azure. Nadella replaces Microsoft two-decades plus veteran Bob Muglia.
Nadella is no stranger to Microsoft success, having taken over the Microsoft Dynamics business from Great Plains founder Doug Burgum.
Nadella also has some serious cloud chops, having been a senior vice president in the Microsoft Online Services Division.
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/14/2011 at 1:18 PM1 comments