18 Features Windows Should Have (but Doesn’t)

Love it or hate it, Microsoft Windows is the world’s most dominant operating system. But when you look at some of the hot features found in competitors such as Linux and Mac OS X, both XP and Vista can seem a little incomplete.

From intuitive interface features like Apple’s application dock and Cover Flow to basic media capabilities such as ISO burning, Windows often falls short on built-in goodies. And some features that other operating systems offer by default– such as 64-bit processing and business-networking tools–require a premium-version license in Windows.

We took a good look at a variety of OSs, from the Mac to Linux to PC-BSD and beyond, and we rounded up a list of our favorite features–few of which come standard in any version of Windows. We even considered some operating systems of yore, and recalled a couple of cool features that Microsoft still hasn’t caught on to. Some of these features simply aren’t available for Windows at all, owing to the way the OS is designed. But you can add most of them to XP or Vista with the help of third-party applications, and we’ll show you how to get them.

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Detecting Rogue Wireless

Wireless networking technologies are a rich playground for hackers — both ethical penetration testers and malicious attackers. There are many avenues of attack, ranging from attacking the infrastructure, the clients, or the actual traffic through man-in-the-middle sniffing and manipulation. Rich Mogull covered the wireless “Evil Twin” attack in his recent “Hacking WiFi” column, where he describes a malicious wireless network set up to spoof a legitimate one to exploit users’ vulnerable Web browsers or to steal their credentials.

What about wireless attacks closer to home — as in your enterprise network? There are protections you can put into place on clients that limit what access points they can connect to based on name, MAC address, and network characteristics such DNS, gateway, and subnet. What would happen if someone plugged a wireless access point (AP) into your network? Maybe you’ve got some sort of NAC-ish solution to prevent it from getting an IP, but suppose an attacker found a rarely used network printer, changed the MAC address on the AP to match the printer, and plugged it in?

This is one of the many attacks that Paul Asadoorian and Larry Pesce of the popular PaulDotCom Security Weekly podcast have been researching over the last year as they put together their book, “Linksys WRT54G Ultimate Hacking,” and developed a course for the SANS Institute, “Network Security Projects Using Hacked Wireless Routers.” I caught the last half hour of Larry’s SANS course in Orlando and was able to spend a few minutes talking with him. They’ve done some impressive work and the clever ways of hiding rogue access points in common everyday office spaces are interesting.

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‘Long-Term’ Phishing Attack Underway

The notorious Rock Phish gang has added a new twist to its phishing exploits that doesn’t require its victim to visit a malicious Website — instead, it just loads a malicious keylogging Trojan onto the victim’s machine that steals information or credentials.

Both Trend Microand F-Secure over the past few days spotted new iterations of the attack, which was first reported by RSA last week. The latest tack is phishing emails posing as Comerica Bank and Colonial Bank that ask banking customers to renew their digital certificates. When they click on the link for more information on the phony renewal process, it downloads the nasty Trojan onto their desktops.

“In a way, it’s so blatant that it reminds me of the worms of ’04 and ’05… such as Bagel. They would come via email, and you’d receive an executable file” in them, says Jamz Yaneza, threat research project manager for Trend Micro.

The danger of the so-called Zeus Trojan is that it can execute what Yaneza calls a “long-term” phishing attack on the victim. “It can stay there and log credentials, personal information, and steal personal information. Basically anything you type,” he says. The version Trend has been studying has the ability to receive downloaded updates to itself, he says.

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WordPress PHP Code Execution and Cross-Site Scripting

Two vulnerabilities have been reported in WordPress, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks, bypass certain security restrictions, and to compromise a vulnerable system.

1) A vulnerability is caused due to improper access restriction of the administration section. This can be exploited to bypass the authentication mechanism and gain administrative access by setting a specially crafted cookie. This can further be exploited to execute arbitrary PHP code.

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires that registering new accounts is enabled.

The vulnerability is reported in version 2.5.

2) Input passed to an unspecified parameter is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user’s browser session in context of an affected site.

The vulnerability is reported in version 2.5. Prior versions may also be affected.

Solution:
Update to version 2.5.1.

Source: Secunia

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Rock Phishers Up the Ante with More ‘Digital Certificates’

Our friends from RSA have recently reported about the latest one-two punch employed by the infamous Rock Phish gang (also reported here and here ). Best known for their easy-to-use kits that yield professional looking phishing pages, Rock Phish now adds information-stealing malware — dubbed as the Zeus Trojan — in its arsenal.

This attack is reminiscent of the Bank of America phishing attack, which we reported several days ago, wherein users are prompted to install a “digital certificate” in order to access the bank’s online login page. Incidentally, the phishing page was also Rock Phish.

And apparently there were more: Trend Micro Advanced Threats Researcher Paul Ferguson and the TrendLabs Content Security team came across a couple of malicious “certificates” detected as TSPY_PAPRAS.AC and TSPY_PAPRAS.AD. These spyware each target the Comerica and Colonial banks, respectively.

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