Alexander’s Blog

Microsoft recently announced the release of Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products, including Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, Antigen Spam Manager and Antigen Enterprise Manager. These products will be available to customers on July 1, 2006.

Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products use multiple scan engines to help provide comprehensive protection from viruses, spam and other security threats. In addition to scan engines from industry-leading security companies AhnLab Inc., Authentium Inc., CA Inc., Kaspersky Lab, MailFilters.com Inc., Norman Data Defense Systems Inc., Sophos Plc and VirusBuster Ltd., all Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products now include the new Microsoft anti-virus engine.

Here’s a list of products that will be available.

1. Antigen for Exchange provides anti-virus and content filtering for Exchange Server 2003 and 2000, stopping threats that get past perimeter defenses while simultaneously containing internal incidents.

2. Antigen for SMTP Gateways provides anti-virus and content filtering for Windows Server™ 2003 and Windows Server 2000 Server SMTP Gateways, stopping threats before they reach internal messaging resources and users.

3. Antigen Spam Manager provides anti-spam and content filtering for Windows®-based SMTP and Exchange servers, stopping spam before it can affect user and network productivity.

4. Antigen Enterprise Manager provides centralized management for Antigen-protected servers, improving IT administrators’ visibility into and control of e-mail server security.

5. Antigen Messaging Security Suite provides comprehensive anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering for Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server e-mail servers and SMTP gateways (includes Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways and Antigen Spam Manager).

6. Antigen Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. Provides critical events and alerts on virus, worm and spam activity to Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 from Antigen for Exchange Server 2003, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, and Antigen Spam Manager, and monitors the health and availability of these products.

Click here for more details.

By default, write caching is enabled in Windows XP to improve disk performance. However, if there’s a power failure or system crash, you may lose your data or it can possibly get corrupted. If your system tends to crash or the power in your area is not very reliable you may consider turning off the write-back caching feature. If your computer is protected with an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) and is fairly reliable you should leave the write-back caching enabled to improve write performance.

To disable write caching follow the procedure described below.

1. Start Windows Explorer
2. Right-click your Local Disk and select Properties
3. Click on the Hardware tab
4. Select your hard drive and click on Properties
5. Click the Policies tab
6. Uncheck the box “Enable write caching on the disk”

To demonstrate some of the security issues, Joel Helgeson of Appiant.net has posted a video that shows how he used SQL injection to bypass security controls on a college Web site. In this video he demonstrates how easy this type of attack can be. If you are a Web developer, this is a good reminder for you to test your Web applications thoroughly for security issues.

The video is available on appiant.net’s Web site.

Exploit Video (WMV format - 7.8MB - 3:25 min)
Exploit Fixed (WMV format - 764KB - 37 secs)

Check out this video from Microsoft on SQL Security. It looks at the security architecture of SQL server 2000 and introduces the SQL Server 2005 Security model. It also shows you how to lock down SQL server implementations.

Microsoft offers a standalone version of the Device Emulator that shipped with Visual Studio 2005. You can install this and use to run and showcase device applications. The Microsoft Device Emulator 1.0 is a standalone version of the same ARM based Device Emulator that ships as part of Visual Studio 2005. The standalone emulator is intended for situations when you want to demonstrate or test your application on a computer that does not have Visual Studio 2005 installed.

The emulator download contains the Standalone Device Emulator as well as the Windows Mobile 5.0 with Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP). The installation for Windows Mobile 5.0 MSFP depends on the Virtual Machine Network Driver (VMNet) being present on your machine, before it installs.

The emulator is supported on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1.

Click here to download the emulator.
Click here to download the VMNet driver.

Additional information and instructions are available from Microsoft.

Instant messaging, the quicker-than-e-mail alternative for online communication, is moving rapidly from teenagers’ bedrooms to mainstream America.

Last month, the number of instant messages containing computer “malware” soared by 500 percent from the previous month, according to one Internet security company. In the first quarter of 2006, the number was up more than 160 percent from a year earlier.

Last year, security experts found 2,400 different viruses, worms and other threats that hackers attached to instant messages, an increase of nearly 1,600 percent from the previous year. The programs were designed to take over computers, steal online passwords or break into computer files.

Currently, about 103 million people actively use instant messaging programs such as AOL’s AIM, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger and others. More info…