We have been made aware of a recent blog posting pointing to the fact that the print spooler vulnerability used by W32.Stuxnet and addressed in the Microsoft Windows Print Spooler Service Remote Code Execution Vulnerability was in fact known about since 2009. An article was published in a security magazine that showed how the vulnerability worked in late 2009. We are currently investigating this; however, from our initial review of that article it appears to do exactly what Stuxnet does when exploiting the Print Spooler vulnerability. We will update this article with more information shortly.

Update: We have confirmed with Microsoft that this issue is indeed one that was patched with the release of Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10...

While things had been quiet, we were quite certain that the gang behind Trojan.Hydraq hadn't gone away. It looks like they are back, as we've been seeing evidence of their attacks since January, including an attack I’d like to talk about below.

A PDF malware sample exploiting a critical Adobe zero-day vulnerability was reported in the wild a few days ago. In this post we want to provide more information about this in-the-wild malware and the attack rather than the vulnerability itself.

A public report of the PDF malware seen in the wild showed a social engineered email with following properties:

Subject “David Leadbetter’s One Point Lesson”
Sent date: “Monday, September 06, 2010 8:01 AM”
Attachment:  Golf Clinic.pdf (Md5: 9c5cd8f4a5988acae6c2e2dce563446a)

The PDF file attached to the...

Hello and welcome to this month’s blog on the Microsoft patch releases. This month’s release is the largest bulletin count since the start of the Patch Tuesday program, and a tie for the largest number of vulnerabilities addressed—the vendor is releasing 14 bulletins covering a total of 34 vulnerabilities.

Fourteen of the issues are rated “Critical” and affect Windows, SMB Server, Internet Explorer, Word, and Silverlight. Of particular note, the SMB Server issue can be exploited remotely, without authentication, to completely compromise an affected computer. The remaining issues, rated “Important” and “Moderate,” affect SMB Server, Windows, Word, and Excel.

As always, customers are advised to follow these security best practices:

- Install vendor patches as soon as they are available.
- Run all software with the least privileges required while still maintaining functionality.
- Avoid handling files from unknown or questionable sources....

It seems like almost everyone I know has an iPhone, or at least wants one. Among iPhone users in the U.S.—where the phone’s operating system is locked and customers are limited to just one carrier—jailbreaking the devices is almost as popular. Jailbreaking Apple devices such as the iPhone essentially unlocks the operating system to allow root access, enabling users to make additional customizations to their phones.
 
Jailbreaking iPhones has its risks, because it opens the door to the devices becoming more susceptible to attack and malware infection. Another concern is that the vulnerabilities in the devices that the jailbreak code exploits could also be used to carry out malicious attacks against the users of the phones.
 
Just yesterday, such an exploit was published, targeting the fourth generation iPhone for the purpose of jailbreaking the device. Thankfully, the details of the exploit are not publicly documented and the...