System7 » procload

Recap of Twitter document leak

procload — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:29:11 +0000

There’s a great recap of the recent Twitter document leak here: http://www.thefaredge.com/?p=6996

In summary:

HC accessed Gmail for a Twitter employee by using the password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email. In this case the secondary email was an expired Hotmail account, he simply registered it, clicked the link and reset the password. Gmail was then owned.

HC then read emails to guess what the original Gmail password was successfully and reset the password so the Twitter employee would not notice the account had changed.

HC then used the same password to access the employee’s Twitter email on Google Apps for your domain, getting access to a gold mine of sensitive company information from emails and, particularly, email attachments.

HC then used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other Twitter employee personal and work emails.

HC then used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon and iTunes, among other services. A security hole in iTunes gave HC access to full credit card information in clear text. HC now also had control of Twitter’s domain names at GoDaddy.

Even at this point, Twitter had absolutely no idea they had been compromised.

VLC Update

procload — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:55:13 +0000

If you’re not already using the VLC Media Player I highly recommend it. First and most important it has a great security track record (it’s open source!) Second it’s bundled with just about all the codecs you’ll ever need (forget downloading DivX etc separately). Last, it’s multi platform!

0.9.9 has just been released and no security issues were addressed (actually a good or bad sign depending how you look at it)

Biggest highlights:

Improved Intel-based Mac performance
New decoder included for Real Video — however, how popular is real these days?

System7 Redesign

procload — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:49:59 +0000

As some of you may have noticed, we have been experimenting with some new designs here at S7. For now, this is the current version until we officially relaunch in the coming months.

Upon our relaunch, we will bring back the old file and user system that many of you have come to love. Until then, please subscribe to our RSS feed and keep checking back for improvements.

In the meantime, if you notice any errors with the current design please comment below so we can fix any issues as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to bringing you the possible S7.

IE8 Released

procload — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:23:17 +0000

In case you haven’t heard Internet Explorer 8 was released yesterday. You can download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx

I played around with it a little last night. Unfortunately it’s the same user interface as IE7. Where IE8 really steps it up is with security and privacy. There’s a built in SmartScreen filter that notifies you if a page is known to be malicious.

You can also clear all of your browsing artifacts with one click. There is also a new context menu (right click) that lets you jump right to your blog or map an address. There is compatibility mode to render pages as IE7 — what would really be nice is IE6 which so many pages seem to still be built for. Also I noticed they more or less stole the improved Firefox address bar that doubles as a history search.

I recommend trying it at least to give you something to talk about this weekend!