If you are reading this post it means that you are one of us that updated the flash and it stopped working on Firefox. It happened to me several times on different computers and uninstalling, reinstalling both Firefox and Flash player didn’t work, it was still not working. Everything is fine and suddenly, because you updated something now nothing is working, you can’t watch videos online, you can’t play flash games and you can’t visit a flash website. Firefox was, is and will be the web browser of my choice and Flash crashes will not change that.
Windows 8: Stop your PC from waking up automatically
I’ve installed Windows 8 weeks ago and recently my PC started to gain intelligence. It found a clever way to annoy me where normal people can’t do that so easily. I prefer sleep mode instead of shut down because I have a lot of programs open and this saves me time. I was putting my computer to sleep mode and then immediately was waking up. I thought it was a wireless mouse that I have as I enabled USB devices to be able to wake my system. I removed that and I tried again, the same issue, then again until after few tries it stopped waking up. Then again the next day but this time it was worse and after few minutes that I manage to put it to sleep it woke up again. This was obviously an issue that had to stop and because I like to fix things, here we are.
Windows 8: Disable Maintenance Tasks
Microsoft has default maintenance tasks running without you even knowing about them. One is running when the system is idle and the other by default every day at 03:00. This second one is very annoying and it causes many strange problems and behavior. If your computer is waking up is because of this scheduled task and another setting that I will tell you in a next post how to disable. In this post I will explain how to disable those maintenance tasks for those who doesn’t like them.
Authorities need Apple to decrypt iPhone data
Authorities seize digital devices and they want to use the data inside them to find evidence. Some times they can’t decrypt the data and in case of iPhone they ask Apple to decrypt the data for them. In fact, the number of those cases is so big that Apple has a waiting list for them. I don’t think even Apple can decrypt the data as the algorithms used in such devices are not that easy to crack but they don’t have to either. If someone, and in this case Apple, bypass the security lock can gain access to all your unencrypted data. It is believed that Apple built a backdoor to its OS to gain access to any device for whatever reason. Apple then sends the unencrypted data back to the police and they use it to catch bad guys or put them into jail. Some times it is scary how easy it is to unlock a phone, even if it is the company who created its operating system.
Japan authorities try to block Tor
Japan authorities ask from internet service providers to block access to Tor network. Tor is a web service that help users to surf the internet anonymously without the fear that prying eyes are watching them and police use their internet activity against them. It is a way to make internet users to feel some kind of freedom and of course police is not happy about it and they started making efforts to block it. You might think that it is Japan and it doesn’t affect you but this is not true. If Japan authorities block Tor then other countries will do the same, this is happening always.
Flaw in Viber allows full access to smart phones
About 50 million android smart phones have Viber installed and a critical flaw in that app make all those devices vulnerable. It is as easy as sending two messages through Viber and attacker can gain full control to your device. It is scary how easy it is and I would expect a fix and ultra fast by the Viber app creators. You can watch the video to see exactly how it can be done and you can try it with a friend. It is the easiest and fastest exploit that I learned so far for android smart phones.
Disable lockscreen on Samsung devices
I wrote several posts on Apple security holes and how to bypass lockscreen. Security researches found also similar flaw on Samsung devices. Even though this doesn’t work on all Samsung devices but it works and it is a serious issue on those devices. I can’t explain it in words and you need to be patient and fast but in order for bad men to gain access to your smartphone few minutes is nothing. You can try it and if it happens to your device you can contact Samsung to help you protect your device and your personal data.
An HTML5 browser exploit can fill you disk with junk
An HTML5 browser exploit was found recently and it can fill your hard drive with junk data. Usually browsers allow websites to store small files like cookies but in case of HTML5 they allow bigger files around 10MB. This can be exploited and flood a hard drive with such files. In a demonstration, a 22-year-old web developer was able to fill 1GB of hard drive space every 16 seconds. I will let you stop and calculate how long it would take to fill your entire hard disk. I was happy to learn that every browser is vulnerable to this exploit except of my favorite Firefox.
Free Anti-Virus Suite by Baidu
Baidu for those who don’t know is a Chinese search engine, it is called as the Google of Asia. Baidu recently released a free anti-virus suite that will help you to protect your computer by any kind of malware such as viruses, spyware and adware. For a Chinese company we would expect a software in Chinese first and then add support for other languages. The big surprise here is that the anti-virus suite comes only in English. They say it is very fast and light but others are suspicious because it is a product made in China. I don’t believe such company would harm its reputation to release a bad product.
Facebook: OAuth flaw allows full control to any account
Applications in Facebook use the OAuth to communicate with the users and grand additional permissions. The user should click on the ‘Allow’ or ‘Accept’ button in order for the application to gain those permissions. A white-hat Hacker called ‘Nir Goldshlager’ found a flaw that allow any application to gain access with full control to any Facebook account by exploiting the Facebook OAuth. This doesn’t require the user to click on any button, this is also skipped. He also created a video that demonstrates this for those who are interested to see how easy it is to gain full control to any Facebook account.