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yesterday and is being used by hackers now to attack Internet Explorer (IE) users may have been reported 18 months ago or more.

In the security advisory it issued yesterday, Microsoft credited a pair of researchers — Ryan Smith and Alex Wheeler — with reporting the bug. Smith and Wheeler once worked together at IBM’s ISS X-Force, although Wheeler now is at Texas-based 3Com’s TippingPoint DVLabs.

Wheeler confirmed that he and Smith uncovered the vulnerability, but he gave most of the credit to Smith. Wheeler declined, however, to say when the bug was reported to Microsoft. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that,” he said, citing a non-disclosure agreement related to the vulnerability that he signed at the time. Instead, he steered questions to his former employer, ISS X-Force.

“But we worked on it prior to my time with TippingPoint,” Wheeler acknowledged. Wheeler, who is the manager of DVLabs, started at TippingPoint in January 2008.

The CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) number for the vulnerability –CVE-2008-0015 – points to a possible early 2008 reporting date. According to the database, the CVE number was reserved on Dec. 13, 2007.

ISS X-Force was not immediately able today to confirm a reporting date for the vulnerability, but the security firm did note in its own advisory, also published Monday, that hackers have been exploiting the bug since at least June 9, 2009, nearly a month ago.

In fact, X-Force listed two separate vulnerabilities in its advisory, saying that the flawed Microsoft Video Controller ActiveX Library, or the “msvidctl.dll” file, not only contained the buffer overflow bug attributed to Smith and Wheeler, but also harbored a memory corruption vulnerability discovered by X-Force researcher Robert Freeman.

Microsoft did not respond to questions about when it was informed of the vulnerability, and if it was in late 2007 or 2008, why it had not patched the problem.

No matter when it was reported, the bug is serious, Wheeler said today. “This particular vulnerability is relatively easy to exploit in a reliable way, if that makes sense,” he said. “Although it does require setting up malicious hosting servers to serve the exploit … you have to go to a [malicious] Web page to be compromised.”

Attack code hasn’t been posted widely, Wheeler added, but it won’t be hard for other hackers to duplicate what’s already in the wild. “It will be relatively simple to do that,” he said, “compared to what they have to choose from at the moment.”

Yesterday, Microsoft not only confirmed ongoing attacks against IE6 and IE7 users running Windows XP, but also offered an automated tool that sets 45 different “kill bits” in the ActiveX control, effectively disabling it and rendering attacks moot.

But Wheeler suggested another option: switch browsers. “Unless they’re specially configured, other browsers will face substantially lower risk,” said Wheeler. Browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari don’t rely on ActiveX technology to drive add-ons, as does IE.

“Any client-side vulnerability is serious,” said Wheeler, “but of the range, this one is in the more serious range.”

Microsoft has promised to patch Windows and/or IE, but has not committed to a delivery date. Its next regularly-scheduled security updates will be released a week from today, on July 14.

I remember how chuffed I was when I discovered I could use my Panasonic music centre to tape my mates’ vinyl record collections. On just two C120s I recorded the Hawkwind back catalogue and still had space to tack on the best of X-ray Spex (1979 was a musically-confusing year). The music centre was the first mass-produced legal downloader and millions of us created vast vaults of tapes of our favourite bands. I don’t remember any heavies from the record industry turning up on my doorstep to threaten me with prosecution for illegal taping. And I don’t recall any sanctimonious hectoring about stealing from the mouths of starving artists. They don’t make music centres any more. But they do send the men in black round if you try to avoid paying for your albums.

Are 'Men in Black' checking your IP address on behalf of the entertainment giants?

Illegal downloading in the UK has become a massive threat to the music and film industries. In 1997, 78 million singles were sold in the UK; last year, it was just 8.6m. It is estimated that half the population has engaged in some sort of nefarious downloading in the last five years.

So what is being done to stop it and what can you expect if you are caught illegally downloading music, film and TV show files? The first thing to note is that the internet is not the law-free community that its architects had intended when it was dreamt up 30 years ago.In the 1970s and 1980s, record companies were happy to turn a blind eye to the taping of albums, largely because there had to be at least one hard copy purchase before the copying could begin. That is not the case with the huge range of downloading options offered on the internet. In Britain there is an equally-dazzling raft of copyright laws that can be invoked to prosecute offenders.

Torrentz is a torrent meta-search engine based in Sweden. that indexes torrents from various major torrent sites like Mininova, Demonoid, and The Pirate Bay. It offers compilations of various trackers per torrent that are not necessarily present in the default .torrent file so when a tracker is down, other trackers can do the work.you can download almost anything from toreentz site .ranging from movies ,songs ,PC games.etc.In a way Torrent is the biggest form of online piracy going on in todays world, Though I am no where near a torrent –addict I still manage to download around 40-50 gb every month., Compare this to the scenario a few years back when a person buying a brand new Pc got a hard disk with around 40 Gb storage space -the space torrent freaks can consume in matter for just 3-4 days . However the most people complain that their torrent speed are slow ..i.e a person getting a transfer speed of around 200 kb/s on a 2 mb/s line gets around 110 or even less when downloading with torrent.There arte several ways to increase torrent speeds some of them are as follows.

1.SHARE RATIO: The main difference between direct download and downloading using torrent is that in case of direct download the file is stored in a remote server and all the users download the file from the same location .,while torrent is a peer to peer service the file is not stored in a single specific location The protocol works initially when a file provider makes his file (or group of files) available to the network. This is called a seed and allows others, named peers or leechers to connect and download the file.after other people finish the download they again become the seed i.e they help other people downloading the file from theioirPC,s

2 .PORT FORWARDING : Sumtimes the ports used by the torrent client are blocked by the windows firewall or the hardware firewall of the router provided ny the I.S.P how to test whether the port is forwarded or not check this site :http://portforward.com/ is a good resource to also test and know more about port forwarding

Another important link

http://utorrent.com/faq.php#What_do_the_Network_Status_lights_mean.3F

3. TORRENT ACCLERATORS-: These software’s accelerate torrent speed by maximizing bandwidth usage to get the latest torrent accelerator

try this
www.trafficspeeders.com
and dwld a accelerator for ur torrent client

4 CLOSE BACKGROUND PROGRAMS WHILE DOWNLOADING : Although Torrent clients like Bit torrent ,u torrent are very small in size they consume large memory resources while the download is on so if any other memory consuming program runs parallel then the download speed is decreased. So try to close down all background programns while download is on

5. PRIVATE TORRENTZ : I stumbled upon this while searching for a solution of my problem There are torrents called private torrents which give you a constant high speed. Google it u will find many sites offering u private torrents .u just hav to register for free.

.for ppl who hav high bandwidth like me(around 2 mbps) u can use these torrents they give around 200 kb/s s download speed in a 2 MBPS line. The catch however is that u hav to maintain a atleast 0.3 upload/download speed ratio ..or else u will be banned form site..but if its just a single large download that is troubling u then …fuck the rules ..get ur download …get banned….n ……get hold of a new site…

6 .SIMULTANEOUSLY DOWNLOAD 2 OR MORE TORRENTZ :

In order to gain the maximum of the available bandwidth I suggest u download 2 or more torrentz.then at least the band width which was lying useless would be utilizes this is specially useful for users whose download speed exceeds 220-230 kb/s because often a torrent doesn’t utilize that much bandwidth(especially dose with peer/seed ratio of 2or more) so instead of queing up downloads it is better to download simultaneously. As long as the the total bandwidth is more than the cumulative bandwidth utilized by the torrents then adding 1 more download will not affect the speed of the existing download in any way .