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Computer Security Weekly, May 3, 1999

May 3, 1999

Those who got hit by Chernobyl (aka CIH) last week probably aren't reading this. But, if a friend got hit, here are some tips.

If you don't have a flash BIOS, then the disk erasure is easy to recover from if you have a backup. (You ... *do* have a backup, don't you?) If you have a flash BIOS (which we in the antivirus field have been recommending against for years), there may be some people in your area who can reburn it for you. This relies on

you knowing the BIOS version you have, and
having a flash BIOS that isn't soldered into place on the motherboard.

If you don't know what BIOS you have, or don't have a socketed chip, you may want to start thinking about upgrading your motherboard.

Incidentally, those of you with Compaq systems may get a break: Compaq has a fallback system with a ROM BIOS that will allow you to boot a repair disk and reburn the flash BIOS on the machine.

To check for CIH and many other viral baddies, you might want to go grab a copy of F-PROT.

In regard to the reports of "shopping cart" system insecurities noted last week, one BUGTRAQ reader found a site that had a publicly accessible file listing every order ever made on the site ...

Outlook 98 has a handy spam filter built in. Unfortunately, it makes mistakes, as all such systems do. Even more unfortunately, you can't really correct its errors. You can add rules in order to make it more restrictive, but you can't remove any of the built in rules.

The book reviews that I send out daily go to various topically related newsgroups and mailing lists. But, of course, not every newsgroup and mailing list gets all of the reviews. So I do have mailing lists (under the name techbooks) running on both the eGroups and Topica systems, since those allow posting by email. Turns out eGroups has a bit of a security weakness: it is not all that difficult to figure out how to forge an approval message, and thus spam the list.

More information on the proposed Australian Internet censorship information can be found here. Some points:

Content will be rated by film, rather than book, classifications. This means it would be illegal to post some legal books online.
Fines are pretty stiff. Small ISPs would probably have to block all sites, and selectively permit those guaranteed to have acceptable content.

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