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Yahoo partners with McAfee

Darko on May 6th, 2008

Yahoo opened the beta test of SearchScan in several countries to help safeguard people against potentially dangerous links in their search results. Searchers may notice something different about the search results in Yahoo. The company partnered with security vendor McAfee, which runs the SiteAdvisor service, to power a new feature called SearchScan. “While SearchScan will be on by default, users have control over how they use the feature,” said the Yahoo Search blog. “In preferences, users can choose to turn the feature off or choose to filter out all sites with warnings from their search results.” SearchScan compares links with an index of ones it has checked for possible problems, like browser exploits, unsafe downloads, or just the likelihood the site spams visitors who give it an email address. McAfee said its site ratings are based on automated safety tests of websites, and include feedback from volunteer reviewers and its analysts. Yahoo’s Vish Makhijani, SVP & GM for their search engine, noted on the official Yahoo blog how they are the only search site providing this type of advance warning today. People will see these warnings appear in red with the listing SearchScan flags. SearchScan should be of great benefit to people whose less than perfect spelling leads them to mistype a query, which could return a link or two that direct people to a dangerous website. Some scammers register incorrectly spelled domains in the hopes of bringing in visitors who hit a wrong letter or two. Other search sites may want to consider similar initiatives. Google for one has been vexed for months with SEO poisoning attacks that drop links to infected pages into its listings. Their work with StopBadware.org doesn’t seem to notice these links, and that’s not good for visitors.

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Attackers exploit recent Microsoft fix

Darko on April 16th, 2008

Hackers continue trying to exploit a patched vulnerability in Microsoft’s Graphic Display Interface (GDI), researchers said this week.

Craig Schmugar, threat researcher at McAfee, reported that the first exploit was discovered on Friday, three days after the issue was patched by bulletin MS08-021.
“One method the bad guys use is to take the patch and reverse engineer it,” Schmugar said on Tuesday. “They look at the files on the computer prior to installing the patch and then after, and try to compare the two and see how they can take advantage of the change.”

The exploit – which can permit remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted EMF or WMF image file – does not affect customers who have installed the updates detailed in MS08-021, said Bill Sisk, security response communications manager for Microsoft.

“By default, Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 customers will have this update applied automatically through Automatic Updates,” Sisk said.

Microsoft encourages all customers to apply its most recent security updates to help ensure that their computers are protected from attempted criminal attacks.

Schmugar said that GDI has had vulnerability issues in the past. The fact that Microsoft credited three researchers with discovering the flaw suggests that multiple people were looking for potential problems and more problems could be on the way.

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