Does RAM Latency Matter?

System memory is often the forgotten cousin among components when you’re building a new PC. A lot of PC builders just buy whatever’s out there, as long as it works in their systems. Some enthusiasts take the opposite route. They get expensive ultra-high-frequency or low-latency memory, hoping it will give them a big performance boost. Most major memory manufacturers now offer special low-latency memory. Kingston has a low-latency line of their HyperX DDR400 RAM. Crucial offers a high-performance line called Ballistix. OCZ Technologies has sold specialized low-latency RAM for a long time. And an “LL” designation shows up in Corsair’s XMS memory line to indicate this characteristic.

You can pay from 30 to 100 percent more for these low-latency offerings, but are they worth the extra money? We examine the effects of low-latency memory on two high-end systems to determine its value to PC builders.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1637763,00.asp

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Keylogging Trojans Spreading Via Email

A very nasty trend is developing in the world of malware. At risk is your credit card number, social security number and, indeed, your entire identity.

Criminals are distributing spam emails which purport to link to details of a fictitious credit card order. If someone clicks that link and is running a Windows operating system that has not been patched recently, the page linked in the email will install a trojan onto the PC. The trojan acts as a keylogger, making a log of every key pressed on the keyboard. Someone could log into the trojan and retrieve the log. From that log, the attacker could discover passwords, account numbers and any number of other personal details.

By now, many internet users know better than to fall for so-called “phishing” scams. A phishing scam attempts to trick a victim into providing account numbers and passwords by having them log into an account at what appears to be their bank. In fact, the phisher’s site usually is a mock-up that looks identical to the bank but has no other relationship to it.

This new scam doesn’t require even that much effort. While many people would not be fooled by a phishing attempt, plenty of people would at least click the link to see the details of the fictitious order. If nothing else, it may appear to be an honest mistake made by a legitimate company. If your computer has not been patched for security flaws, simply loading the page is all that is required to install this keylogging trojan. Unfortunately, even being up-to-date on security patches may not be enough as there are plenty of unfixed bugs in Windows. To learn how to protect yourself against this sort of auto-installing malware, read my article on how to prevent a browser hijacking (mirror).

http://www.spywareinfo.net/aug18,2004#trojan

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E-mail viruses getting smarter

Computer viruses spread by e-mail are growing more sophisticated as virus writers and spammers are thought to be joining forces in an effort to make smarter bugs, a computer security group said Tuesday.

New York-based MessageLabs, which scans client e-mails for viruses to block, said it picked apart some 5.6 billion e-mails from January to June this year and found one in 12 contained some sort of virus that penetrated firewalls meant to block them.

MessageLabs typically scans about 50 million customer e-mails daily, and its customers include major government and corporate entities from the British government to The Bank Of New York and Japanese technology giant Fujitsu.

While the number of e-mails sent globally was not covered by the study, the problem of computer viruses can be massive. They can overload computers with messages, automatically reboot systems and sometimes disable them.

In August last year, the MSBlast worm spread rapidly around the world, infecting some 230,000 to 300,000 computers, based on estimates from sources ranging from U.S.-based Symantec to Moscow’s Kaspersky Labs.

Soon after, a worm called Sobig.F raced around the globe crashing e-mail networks. At that time, America Online said it blocked 23.2 million copies of Sobig.F, and MessageLabs said about one in 17 e-mails were infected by the virus.

A separate MessageLabs study in the first six months of 2003 showed that one in 208 e-mails contained a virus, up from one in 392 for the first six months of 2002.

MessageLabs said it believes the biggest e-mail security threat during the first half of 2004 was closer cooperation between virus writers and spammers, writers of unsolicited messages that often advertise products or get people to spend money.

The reason the two groups are getting together is profit, MessageLabs has learned through monitoring chat rooms to infiltrate the secretive world of virus writers and spammers.

With the recent proliferation of software blocking spam, the spammers are paying virus writers to create viruses that attach to their e-mails and circumvent the spam blockers.

MessageLabs said its employees who monitor chat rooms have learned that virus writers and spam writers are increasingly exchanging messages about joining ranks.

“There is little or no monetary profit to be gained from simply distributing viruses, but when you combine the capabilities of a virus and the profit that can be earned from spam, suddenly you have an altogether more materialistic proposition,” MessageLabs said in its report.

MessageLabs said its belief about the increasing cooperation was based both on its research through its clients and on industry research.

http://news.com.com/E-mail+viruses+getting+smarter/2100-7349_3-5314020.html

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Is Microsoft’s Firewall Secure?

Some say Win XP SP2 enhancements cause conflicts, don’t protect as claimed.

Security experts and vendors this week welcomed the introduction of Windows Firewall, part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), as a valuable way of protecting PCs. But while the firewall is an improvement, it falls short of the standard of protection expected of commercial firewalls, according to some industry observers.

Windows Firewall–which replaces the old Internet Connection Firewall–marks the first time all up-to-date PCs will have a firewall switched on by default, an important step in stopping the spread of viruses, according to industry analysts. However, the software suffers from two major flaws, critics say: it does not block outbound traffic, and it can be switched off by another application, possibly even by a clever worm.

Jumping the Wall

Most commercial firewalls include a feature to stop all but authorized applications from sending data to the Internet; this stops malicious code from sending unauthorized communications, and also prevents PCs from being hijacked and used to send spam or participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks. Windows Firewall, however, filters only incoming traffic, allowing any application to send outbound packets, a fact which some industry observers have said makes it less useful for serious protection.

“It still isn’t as robust as many third-party host-based firewalls,” writes Jeff Fellinge, information security officer at media company aQuantive, in a recent analysis of the firewall.

More seriously, rival firewall makers claim that the API used to manage the Windows Firewall could also be used by attackers to modify the software or turn it off. Major firewall makers, including Zone Labs, McAfee, and Symantec are preparing SP2-compatible versions of their applications which disable Windows Firewall when they are installed, and enable it again when they are uninstalled.

But if an installer can switch off Windows Firewall, so could an attacker, argues Zone Labs, maker of the popular ZoneAlarm firewall. The company says its own products are locked down in such a way that third-party applications can’t disable firewall protection without uninstalling the software.

Defining Roles

Microsoft admits that, in some cases, malicious code could indeed switch the firewall off. However, this isn’t so much a flaw as a limitation on the role firewalls should play in a company’s security system, according to Microsoft.

“An attacker could misuse that (administrative) capability,” says David Overton, a Microsoft technical specialist. “But you’re already in a compromised state, if you’re at that point.” He says Windows Firewall is designed to stop malicious transmissions to the PC, rather than protecting the PC once it’s been infected.

If malicious code makes it past the firewall, it is the role of anti-virus software to protect the machine, Overton adds. Likewise, it is not the firewall’s place to stop malicious code from sending outbound packets–Microsoft contends that companies should use perimeter technologies to examine outbound traffic.

“The firewall is a management process, not a silver bullet,” Overton says. He says Microsoft’s user testing showed that asking users to approve every application trying to communicate with the Internet tends to backfire.

“If you flood the user with messages like that, they say ‘yes’ all the time,” he says.

Rival firewall makers say they have various ways of dealing with this problem. McAfee, for example, has a “white list” of trusted applications, designed to reduce the number of messages a user receives.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117380,00.asp

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802.11n – Wi-Fi’s next big thing

A group of technology companies including Texas Instruments, Broadcom, and STMicroelectronics is pushing their proposal for the eventual 802.11n Wi-Fi standard that they claim will offer speeds “up to 10 times the speed of the current generation”. Glenn Fleishman over at Wi-Fi Networking News cuts to the chase: “An array of four receive and four transmit antennas in a MIMO configuration (4 x 4) would use 40 MHz of bandwidth, or about twice that used in current 802.11b and g, to achieve speeds up to 540 Mbps (raw throughput).” Of course as usual with Wi-Fi hardware, your mileage may vary.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/51965

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