Within 24 hours, Skid-Row, one of the larger game cracking groups, has rendered that DRM ineffective.

Score: Hackers-1, Ubisoft-embarrassed

Source: InfoAddict.com

Dear God, In 2009 you took my favorite singer – Michael Jackson, my favorite actress – Farrah Fawcett, my favorite actor – Patrick Swayze, my favorite voice – Neda.

Please, please, don’t forget my favorite politician – Ahmadinejad and my favorite dictator – Khamenei in the year 2010. Thank you.

In the last few hours the site has either gotten so overwhelmed that it has crashed or it has been intentionally pulled in an attempt to save face. Either way it is presently unreachable.

A resounding “Hip Hip Hooray!” goes out to the hacker who did this.

A Win 7 option that has seen very little chatter is starting to make the rounds. God Mode is Control Panel on Steroids. Every setting, every option, is in one sheet. It has been reported that this will work in Vista 32bit as well, but will crash the 64bit.

To achieve God status in the 7 world all you need to do is:

• Create a folder on your desktop

• rename the folder GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} (best to copy and paste this)

Once you’ve renamed it the folder will change to a control panel icon. You now have access to every control function available.

I’m not sure if it really lives up to its name. As of yet, no lightning has shot from my fingers, but I’m still trying. Still, it’s one hell of a cool tool.

From Makezine: “Christmas Light Hero is using 7 light controllers from Light-O-Rama built from kits to control 21,268 lights and LEDs. Each controller has 16 outputs and 2-3 TTL level control inputs that are used by the game system to fire different programmed light sequences depending on what happens in the game.”

From the PCWorld article “Although the Connectify beta is free to download, Gizis said that Nomadio would likely pin a price on the final, full-featured version when that’s ready to release in about six weeks.”

Head on over and check the rest of the article out. LINK

or Download the (beta) software and try it out. LINK

Most of the emails look like this:

“Dear Microsoft Customer,

Starting 18/10/2009 the ‘Conficker’ worm began infecting Microsoft customers unusually rapidly. Microsoft has been advised by your Internet provider that your network is infected. To counteract further spread we advise removing the infection using an antispyware program. We are supplying all effected Windows Users with a free system scan in order to clean any files infected by the virus.

Please install attached file to start the scan. The process takes under a minute and will prevent your files from being compromised. We appreciate your prompt cooperation.

Regards,
Microsoft Windows Agent #2 (Hollis)
Microsoft Windows Computer Safety Division”

Email as an attack vector is, at best, archaic. This is a perfect example of a horribly executed campaign that even the average internet user should be able to discern. That being said, my Grand Mother just forwarded me one.

Of those, two very serious issues are being addressed.  The first issue is the arbitrary code execution attack found in SMB v2 and second, the Grand Canyon of a breach in IIS in FTP.

Even though only one issue has been documented, Microsoft will be fixing multiple problems in its implementation of the SMB v2 protocol. This hopefully will close down what is basically the Yellow Brick Road for remote code execution attacks.

The IIS in FTP problem is a bit of another story. Since the report of this flaw in early September, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks have really heated up, affecting businesses both small and large. This  issue affects IIS 5.0 (Windows 2000), IIS 5.1 (Windows XP) and IIS 6.0 (Windows Server 2003).

Wikipedia License

Reportedly, Microsoft has enacted a rapid-response protocol to limit the damage. Considering that Windows Live Id is a single sign on solution this could be a very big deal. Seeing as how the details have been publicly released to the web, this seems more like a warning of sorts about the reality of phishing and/or Hotmail’s lack of security. Either way, potential to take advantage of these accounts on a personal scale could be endless.

Microsoft’s Statement:

“Over the weekend Microsoft learned that several thousand Windows Live Hotmail customers’ credentials were exposed on a third-party site due to a phishing scheme. As always, upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers.
As part of that investigation, we determined that this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts.”

For more information on Phishing, check out the tut below.

Wikipedia