On Thursday, Microsoft released the patch to remove the “SETABORTPROC” functionality from WMF image processing. The patch is on Windows update as # MS06-001, and should be installed on all systems running Windows 2000 and above. Anyone who previously installed the unofficial patch should first install the Microsoft patch, and then uninstall the unofficial patch. [...]
Another day, another cleanup. This morning’s cleanup was described by a new customer like this: “It’s broken. We can’t run our customer database program. The night staff keeps surfing the internet, and loading spyware, so that’s probably it.” What I found was a computer that, on first look, had shortcuts to software on a drive [...]
The newest security issue for Windows is the WMF hole. First, a little history. WMF is the acronym for a Windows Meta File. That’s an old graphics format, vector style. Vector art is drawn by the computer, based on code in the file. (The other kind of graphics is a bitmap, like JPG.) Of course, [...]
I had what was apparently a pretty bad infestation of spyware crud on my Win XP box. Aurora, Limewire, some other stuff. I couldn’t clean it out myself, gave up, and got a referral on a local tech guru. He showed up, took one look, and said he had to take the system to the [...]
Did another spyware cleanup today. User reported that a spyware cleanup tool appeared immediately after running Windows Update. Guess: the update process changes some Internet Explorer settings back to defaults (known), and at that point, a third-party toolbar sitting in the “c:\winnt\downloaded program files” was able to run a delayed install. Moral of the story: [...]
