Computer Security Weekly, November 22, 1999


The rise in the number of network compatible PE-EXE viruses triggered a thought this week. Users of "obsoleteWord Perfect 4.2, even though I have both Word 8 and WordPerfect 8 installed on my machine. I have my reasons for using old software, and it does pretty much everything that I want. The thing is, I am pretty much immune to all of the latest viruses, macro viruses, and email viruses.
If you have been holding off on installing SP6 for NT, you may be wise. A number of bugs have been found (some unconfirmed) which might make waiting a good idea. To date, we have found that Lotus Notes (and possibly Rumba) users are not longer able to work unless they have administrator privileges, a number of driver problems particularly with video cards, problems with winspool.drv, and problems with Winsock applications (again, related to administrator privileges). A number of these problems relate to AFD.sys, and Microsoft has released a HotFix with a new version of this file.


Microsoft Support

And more for the Macists. Mac programmers have traditionally been big on doing an end run around the limitations of the operating system by writing directly to the hardware. With every upgrade of the MacOS, a number of these programs fail, since they are breaking the rules, and behave unpredictably with the new versions. Many of these programs now trigger error number 119. AKUA Interactive has produced a utility called Nine 11, which prevents Macs using OS 9 from stopping programs that generate this error. While this allows the programs to run, it may cause the computer to crash, and may also allow other unknown consequences, including data corruption. These types of utilities should be avoided at all costs.

More Info here and here

Another OS 9 concern. OS 9, for the first time, allows users to "log in" to the machine. As with Windows 9x, this should be considered merely a cosmetic convenience, allowing multiple users to customize their own desktop. One of the security problems that has been noted is that, when a Mac is logged on to a network (particularly a Novell network), logging off the Mac desktop does *not* disconnect from network logins. Thus, a user with high privileges on the network may log off the Mac, but leave the connection open at high privilege for the next user.
The copyright of the article Computer Security Weekly, November 22, 1999 in Computer Security is owned by Robert Slade. Permission to republish Computer Security Weekly, November 22, 1999 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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