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Security Now Notes on WMF Exploit There is a “feature” in the Windows WMF format that allows the execution of arbitary code. It has been there since the beginning (at least 10 years) but only now is coming to light. It is extremely likely that exploitation of this hole will grow. It is also likely that this hole has been used in the past but has not been publicised. A patch is available now from MS Windows Update. Patch your system, update your virus and spyware scanners.

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Just before Christmas we stayed in a very nice hotel with very little clue about what is going on with their network. To cut down on the support calls to their “IT Butler” they, via their network service provider, had re-directed all SMTP port 25 traffic to the service provider’s open relay SMTP server.

I discovered this because Thunderbird was giving me pop-up errors about failure to authenticate. I run my own secure mail server so I spent about an hour logged in via ssh testing the various email functionality. All seemed to be fine. Strange, still getting authentication…

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