Monthly Archives: March 2008

Don’t Register Your Domain with GoDaddy

An interesting Wired story:

Visitors to RateMyCop.com on Tuesday were redirected to a GoDaddy page reading, “Oops!!!”, which urged the site owner to contact GoDaddy to find out why the company pulled the plug.

RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he’d been shut down for “suspicious activity.”

RateMyCop is a new web site that allows users to rate U.S. police officers — someone watching the watchers you might say.

Moral of the story: Don’t buy hosting or domain names from GoDaddy lest you want to risk having your site offline without notice.

Note to webmasters: Caching search terms on your pages to improve your Google ranking is a bad idea

Online attackers have found a way to inject IFRAME redirects into the search results of major sites, including tech news site ZDNet Asia and bittorrent tracker TorrentReactor, researchers discovered on Tuesday.

By abusing the way that the sites cache search queries to optimize their rankings in other search engines — most notably, Google — fraudsters have been able to inject iframe redirects into the cached results. The redirects send unwary users to servers affiliated with the Russian Business Network that attempts to install a fake antivirus product, known as XP Antivirus, according to Dancho Danchev, an independent security researcher based in the Netherlands.

SecurityFocus has the full story.

How to Add the Security Tab in Windows XP Home Edition

One of the posts at our forum that gets the most referral hits is the post Add the Security tab in Windows XP Home Edition. This post was written by our outstanding moderator siliconman01 and describes in detail how you can get the security tab added to the Properties dialog for files and folders even if you use XP Home. Highly recommended and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Tom for his outstanding work with the FAQs and the forum!

How to add the Security tab in Windows XP Home Edition.

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Hack to Bypass XP Password Protection

New Zealand security researcher Adam Boileau has released a program that allows an attacker to log into a password-protected Windows machine via the computer’s Firewire port.

Interviewed in ITRadio’s Risky Business podcast, Boileau said the tool, released to the public today, could “unlock locked Windows machines or login without a password … merely by plugging in your Firewire cable and running a command”.

Boileau, a consultant with Immunity Inc., said he did not release the tool publicly in 2006 because “Microsoft was a little cagey about exactly whether Firewire memory access was a real security issue or not and we didn’t want to cause any real trouble”.

But now that a couple of years have passed and the issue has not resolved, Boileau decided to release the tool on his website.

The Age has the full story.