We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” ~~ John F. Kennedy

America has lost its fucking mind.  The “land of the free, and the home of the brave” has been reduced to a quivering nation of paranoid loons too easily manipulated by a government so far under the thumbs of a military industrial complex its a wonder they don’t just call it a day and don the uniforms.  Convinced that fear is the new currency, our government has convinced us to shut the lights in the “City on the Hill” and cower behind the curtains like frightened mice.  Setting aside the probability that we’re far more likely to be struck by a meteorite than killed by a terrorist, we bow our heads and shuffle silently forward like the voiceless workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – trudging tirelessly to the machines without so much as hot babe lead us to revolution.  Told by our leaders that truth is subservient to “national security,” we bow down to take an eraser to the U.S. Constitution because, God forbid, we be forced to face up to the embarrassment of our abject failure and remove our heads from our collective asses and deal with the REAL WORLD instead of this bipartisan fairy tale we currently call a democracy.   A wise man once said, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself,” and boy, oh, boy was he ever correct. Continue reading »

 

If you haven’t already heard yet, there’s another security vulnerability in the Adobe’s widely used portable document format (PDF).  What’s different this time around is that the security hole affects not only a single vendor’s product (still looking at you, Adobe), but many alternate products that utilize the PDF specification itself.  Take a look at the two links below to see how one newly discovered vulnerability has morphed into something far more dangerous:

Initial Report: http://blog.didierstevens.com/2010/03/29/escape-from-pdf/

Today’s Update: http://siemblog.com/2010/04/implications-of-recent-pdf-launch-hacks/

For those disinclined to wade through the technical discussion, they essentially state that it is now possible for an attacker to modify a PDF file, any PDF file, in such a way as to embed executable code that will run upon opening a document.  User’s receiving and opening such a file  a user will still be presented with a prompt requesting permission to launch the code, something an intelligent and informed user should recognize as an immediate red flag, but, as the examples in the above links illustrate, an attacker can modify part of the language of the prompt to be something as apparently benign as “Click OK to view this PDF”.  As most uninformed users will blow past such prompts without so much as a second’s pause to consider the actual content, the probability of a successful exploit is high.  If such a user allows the code to execute, it can do pretty much whatever an attacker wishes it to do: Erase files, launch malware installers, or, as the second link explains, infect every other PDF on the system by applying an incremental update that allows new executable code to be injected into previously saved, and previously clean, PDF files.  It’s the “I Love You” virus all over again. Continue reading »

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