Attack Computer Wiz

Google and YouTube have both announced that they will be ending support of Internet Explorer 6 beginning in March. Many companies have been phasing out support for IE6 for some time now.

This is ahead of the actually end of support date that Microsoft has set of July 13, 2010. After that date Microsoft will no longer be providing updates to the IE6 browser. This means that any new security risk, bug, or if a technique is found that a hacker could use to break into your system, Microsoft will not provide support of patches for it.

It would be best for you to act ahead of this. To confirm that you are using IE6, in your browsers menu bar choose “Help” then "About". This will display the current version of the browser you are using. If you find that you are running IE6 (or even IE7) I encourage you to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3.6. Below I have included links to ensure that your computer can handle IE8 and download links.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Download
Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Download (recommended)

Posted by Mike Wright

How many times have you clicked on a link only to be directed to a web page full of pornography, advertisements, or sites asking you to install who knows what? What about that cool FaceBook fan page that your second cousins uncle suggested that you be a fan of that sends you to an endless loop of data mining websites.

There is a great little free application that can be installed on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome. It is called Web of Trust or WOT and you can find a link to download and install at the bottom of this post.

This software integrates with your web browser and will advise you if a website that you are trying to access has a good reputation or not. It will also rate your searches so after you submit a Google or Yahoo! search you will see a rating next to the results. It is very easy to ignore any result with a big red circle next to it.

They have a process for you to submit sites that you think may be inappropriate and rate them accordingly. You can also re-rate sites that other people may have miss-rated.

I feel that installation of this application will save you and whoever supports your computer lots of time and money.

Web of Trust (WOT)

Posted by Mike Wright

A "Highly Critical" vulnerability has been discovered in Firefox 3.5. The vulnerability is in the way Firefox handles JacaScript code. At this time there is not vendor patch but there is a band aid.

Open your about.config file in Firefox and find the line titled "javascript.options.jit.content". Set the value to "false". I also found on another blog that you may want the ensure that the value "javascript.options.jit.chrome" is also set to "false".

Secunia.com
Mozilla Security Blog

Update 7/21/2009

Fix (LINK)

Posted by Mike Wright