Alexander’s Blog

Microsoft’s Excel application contains a vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to gain access to a system.

The flaw affects multiple versions of the spreadsheet software, including Excel 2000, 2002 and 2003, as well as versions of Microsoft Office containing those versions. It can also be manipulated in Excel Viewer 2003 and Office 2004 for Mac. Click here for more details.

Mozilla Firefox can protect your saved certificates and passwords with a master password. If you want to reset the master password, you can simply provide the current password and reset it to a new one. However, if you forget your master password then you are in trouble and will not have the option to change the existing password.

You can reinstall Firefox over an existing version, or you can even remove Firefox completely and reinstall a fresh copy, you still will not be able to reset the master password. But here’s a method that you can use to reset the master password in Firefox. Type the following command in the address box in your browser and then click the reset button in the lower right corner, as shown in the graphic.

chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul

If you run into a situation where the above method does not work, then you may need to hack the password using a Firefox master password recovery tool, such as FireMaster.

Saw these 15 Apple commercials on youtube. You’ve probably seen most of them on TV but in case you missed them :).

Microsoft has a performance testing tool for Active Directory called ADTest. It is primarily an Active Directory load-generation tool that allows you to simulate client transactions on the host server. According to Microsoft “By varying client load, you can relate the transaction rate to resource utilization on the server and get some idea about the requirements for your environment. Because ADTest can perform generic Active Directory requests, it can also create an organizational unit structure inside Active Directory. You can add many organizational units and user objects in those ADTest-created organizational units. You can also add attributes to the user objects. Once you have created the Active Directory structure you require, you can use ADTest to perform various Active Directory requests, including Modify and Search. Several pre-built tests have been written to reproduce some typical activities you might want to evaluate. Examples of these pre-built tests are: an interactive logon, a batch logon, a search for a random user, and a modification of an attribute of a random user. By varying your hardware environment or other test parameters, you can gain insight into the performance sensitivities of your particular setup.”

Microsoft reminds users that benchmarking and performance exercises only useful for a general understanding of the hardware requirements for various implementations. The tests that you run take place in a limited lab environments so they may not translate directly to real-world scenarios. In other words, use this tool just to get some general ideas and don’t depend on the results too much for a production environment.

You can download the tool here.