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musings of mark since 2001

Once again, M$ is under the gun with just about every operating system other than Windows DOS, 98, and NT threatened with yet another new virus vulnerability. This one is even on the 5:00 o’clock news as it’s a sly one that causes a buffer overrun (this is the most common Windoze exploit, it’s practically generic in the OS) in the engine that processes JPEG files to infect the machine. Of course, Internet Exploder is affected too and you can get the new virus that turns your machine into a zombie just by visiting an infected web site.

The JPEG image-processing vulnerability is the latest flaw from Microsoft and the source of the company’s 28th advisory this year. Microsoft frequently includes multiple issues in a single advisory; four advisories in April, for example, contained more than 20 vulnerabilities.

The news item goes on about “the jpeg of death” and how the code is available on the internet already. Of course the answer according to M$ is spend more money on their operating system and upgrade. At least they are still supporting (but not for long!) Internet Exploder and you can get a patch for it here.

Glad my parents are sticking with Win98, it’s really all you need for surfing the internet and answering email as long as it’s set up to read email in plain text and ActiveX controls are not set to run automatically. A good firewall like Zone Alarm completes the picture; doesn’t hurt to use a browser like Firefox too instead of constantly updating Internet Exploder. Still hesitant to actually recommend Firefox to anyone that isn’t a power user, as having Netscape or any other Mozilla products that already installed makes the need to remove them to get a clean install of Firefox. The Flash install is easier with a plug in locator that works well for everything so far except QuickTime, but then I had it QT off my system for the past few months anyways and that may have had something to do with it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Debris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.