Believe It Or Not, Chris Tiu is a Boring Host

I'm a big fan of Ripley's Believe or Not, from the great Jack Palance to the later Dean Cain (of Lois and Clark) as hosts.

On Philippine TV, the show is anchored by Ateneo Basketball star Chris Tiu. While he's a very good basketball player, his hosting skills need lots of polishing...to the point of being boring with an almost monotonous tone reminiscent of AM radio station hosts.

Didn't you notice it? Try to listen to the way he presents each Believe It or Not feature and you'll see...he also depends too much on the teleprompter...

Microsoft Internet Explorer Flaw: Patch Tuesday and Exploit Wednesday (MS08-078)

The just released patch for critical IE flaw by Microsoft, released out-of-band and not along with the regular batch of Patch Tuesday schedules just makes you realize that the vulnerability being corrected is really critical.

Normally, MS will release patches on the second Tuesday of the month, that's why it's called Patch Tuesday.

When I got wind of the vulnerability release, I immediately had the patch tested for bugs and rolled out to PCs and laptops with Internet access. It's a good thing that most users in the office don't have Internet Access (was cut off on September 21, an ominous date indeed) and also most of those who have use Firefox.

After a vulnerability's made public (though this exploit has been making the rounds of the underground hacker community for a while now), crackers and miscreants race to develop proof-of-concept codes and exploit the vulnerability, zero day or the next day, aptly called Exploit Wednesday.

For those looking download the latest patch, it's filename is IE7-WindowsXP-KB960714-x86-ENU.exe available at Microsoft Update Website (direct link here)

As for me, I don't use Internet Explorer except for testing and accessing stupid IE-only online banks and websites.

Clickjacking: Attack, Defense and Proof of Concept

Clickjacking, the latest of the seemingly endless attacks concocted by security researchers and crackers where unsuspecting visitors of a website are forced to click on invisible buttons and execute scripts, program, malware to steal passwords, cookies, listen to you , even activate your webcam to see what you're doing.

Almost presented by researchers at OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) and also presented at the Hack in the Box security conference in KL.

For users, it's so dangerous that you'll never know what hit you just by clicking your mouse on a clickjacker's website.

Vulnerable browsers to Clickjacking: ALL (Internet Explorer, Opera, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari)

Clickjacking Countermeasure: Firefox with NoScript add-on.

The only thing that will protect you from a clickjacking website is Firefox with NoScript Add-on, something I've been using be default when browsing the Internet. Just don't set NoScript to "Allow Scripts Globally" for it's useless defense.

For security awareness seminars, I always remind people refrain from visiting untrusted websites but it's hard for them to actually determine which sites are fine to access.

Later, I will test various clickjacking proof of concept codes/scripts to analyze, but not to be one of the miscreants.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Cheats and Trailer

The hugely popular World of Warcraft by Blizzard broke its own record by The Burning Crusade which sold 2.4 million copies n 2007 by the new World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King sold 2.8 Million copies.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Trailer:



Will update this post once my brother finds out World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Cheats one of these days.