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Google has issued an update for its new Chrome browser, following a critical security flaw found by Vietnamese security researchers.

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According to a report in techworld.com, a researcher at the Hanoi University of Technology, the Chrome beta browser posted last week contained a buffer overflow bug that could be used by attackers to hijack PCs.

The researcher found that the flaw can be triggered when the user saves a web page – using Chrome’s “Save page as” command – with a very long name, which created a stack-based buffer overflow that hackers can leverage to introduce additional malicious code.

“To exploit the vulnerability, a hacker might construct a specially-crafted web page, which contains malicious code”. “The hacker would then trick users into visiting his site and convince them to save this page”, thereby giving access to the PC, according to the report.

Google said it has patched the vulnerability Sunday and released an updated beta, version 0.2.149.29, on the same day.

Talk about hot chrome–Googles new Chrome browser has already grabbed 1% of the browser market in its first day, according to a Web metrics provider and a report in computerworld.com.

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Net Applications has put “Chrome’s total market share at around 1%, less than 24 hours after the browser’s launch, passing rivals such as Opera and Netscape in the process”, according to the report.

Net Applications noted that Chrome “jumped from zero to 0.4% during the hour it was released yesterday. Nine hours later, Chrome accounted for 1% of the browsers used to visit the 40,000 or so sites that the company monitors for clients”, according to the report.

So with 1% of the market, Chrome has already overtaken Opera, which Net Applications measured with a 0.74% share at the end of August.

But Chrome still has a little bit to go if it wants to overtake Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which held a 72.2% share of the browser market last month, said Net Applications earlier this week, while Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari owned 19.2% and 6.4%, respectively, according to the report.

The Public Interest Registry, the registry behind the global .Org domain name, says that more than 7 million domain names are now registered as .Org, making it the third largest generic domain (after .com and .net).

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courtesy:www.arnotts.net.au

Since management of the registry was taken over by the Public Interest Registry in 2003, .ORG registrations have increased more than 250 per cent.

 “This is a significant milestone for .Org, as it has consistently grown 20 per cent percent year over year since its management by Public Interest Registry,” says Alexa Raad, CEO. “.Org continues to be the domain of choice for individuals and organisations who seek to brand their efforts under a globally trusted and respected address.”

 The growth in .Org registrations has been driven by internet and societal trends such as social networking, issue awareness, online collaboration and advocacy, all of which have accelerated since 2003. Some notable examples include:
 
— the increasing number of for-profit organizations who choose .Org addresses to emphasize their service missions and as Craigslist puts it, their “non-corporate culture”;
 
— the launch of community sites such as freecycle.org;
 
— increasing number of wikis for collaborative content, made popular by wikipedia.org;
 
— the growth in online political organizing;
 
— empowered bloggers who start their own websites to further their passions or causes such as takebackthefilter.org; and
 
— the growth of the “green” movement as shown by sites like sustainablog.org.
 
“We can’t imagine Wikipedia as a .com — .Org is a core part of our identity,” says Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia and member of the Board of Trustees of The Wikimedia Foundation. “.Org is available to anyone in the world, and it is a great way for an organisation to signal an ambition to be inclusive and global.”
 

Over $980 million was lost as a result of personal fraud according to the first National Personal Fraud Survey, by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which was released today.

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By definition, personal fraud included credit or bank card fraud, identity theft (includes the unauthorised use of a person’s personal details), and the following selected scams; lotteries, pyramid schemes, phishing and related scams, financial advice, chain letters and advance fee fraud.

The survey, conducted in 2007, asked people aged 15 and over about their experiences relating to personal fraud incidents in the preceding 12 months. The survey found that 453,100 Australians lost on average $2,160 as a result of personal fraud.

Other results from the survey include:

A total of 806,000 Australians reported they were victims of at least one incident of personal fraud in the previous 12 months.
This represented some 5 per cent of the population aged 15 years and over.

Half a million Australians experienced a form of identity fraud. The majority 383,300 (77 per cent) were victims of credit or bankcard fraud; identity theft accounted for the balance.

Nearly 6 million Australians (36 per cent) were exposed to a range of selected scams; that is they received, viewed and/or read an unsolicited invitation, request or notification designed to obtain personal information or money or obtain a financial benefit by deceptive means.

And almost 330,000 people fell victim to at least one type of scam by responding to or engaging with the unsolicited offer. The three main categories of selected scams were: lotteries (84,100 victims), pyramid schemes (70,900) and phishing and related scams (57,800).

Only days after hundreds of Australian businesses are still trying to untangle themselves from the so-called UPS parcel virus, Federal Communications Senator Stephen Conroy has welcomed news “advances in filtering technology”.

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“The internet is a wonderful tool that is delivering benefits to increasing numbers of Australian families but the Government wants to find ways to make it safer, particularly for children. This report will assist the Government to deliver on its election commitment to create a safer online environment,” Senator Conroy said.

ISP filtering is one element of the Government’s $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, which also includes education, international cooperation, research and law enforcement.

“The next step is to test filter technologies in a real world environment with a number of ISPs and internet users,” Senator Conroy said.

Senator Conroy’s statements come just days after anti-virus vendor McAfee identified the UPS virus as a variant of Generic Downloader.ab and reported that it was also circulating in a message claiming to include nude pictures of Angelina Jolie. Symantec Security Response also catalogued it as Downloader.Diliv and Panda Security calls the Trojan virus Agent.JEN and notes that it has been in circulation since 2005. The resultant fall-out has been a crippling of a number of businesses both here as well as overseas.

Tests undertaken during the ACMA investigation found that the quality of ISP-level filtering technology has significantly improved compared with the technology used in a previous trial conducted in 2005.

“It is very encouraging to see that the industry has made significant progress with ISP filtering products and we are heartened that many of the products tested are commercially available, with many of them already deployed overseas,” a somewhat relieved Senator Conroy said.

The results in the ACMA trial were based on illegal and inappropriate content. The tests included filtering over and above simple black-list filtering, and the trial did not specifically test the impact of black-list filtering on its own.
“Filtering specifically against a black-list of illegal content as well as the ability to filter additional material will be one part of the upcoming pilot trial,” Senator Conroy said.

“We are interested to see the results of filtering in real-world conditions and I encourage ISPs to participate. This will enable the implementation of ISP filtering in Australia to be undertaken in an informed and effective way.”

In what could only be described as great news for those thinking of buying an iPhone 3G this Friday, Telstra says it broadband is breaking more speed records than an Olympic athletics meet.

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The most recent world first is a joint trial by Telstra and Ericsson of Enhanced High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technology using the 850MHz spectrum to deliver peak network downlink speeds of 21 Megabits per second (Mbps) in 2008 and onwards to 42 Mbps in 2009.

Enhanced HSPA uses software advancements that will maximise the potential of existing infrastructure ahead of the introduction of Long Term Evolution (LTE).

Bill Zikou, CEO of Ericsson Australia/NZ said, “Mainstream mobile network technology continues to advance with the successful trial of Enhanced HSPA, paving the way for the even faster speeds of LTE. Consumers will benefit from a greater range of richer multimedia services on a growing choice of phones and laptops.”

Prior to the HSPA+ or Enhanced HSPA trial, Telstra activated 3G Direct Tunnel technology on its live network, which will provide an increase in data capacity to meet the needs of increased broadband traffic such as data-rich services.

According to a number of overseas reports, internet users worldwide should soon be able to use new domain names such as .love, .sydney or .bank if one of the world wide web’s biggest shakeups is approved this week as expected by the global web regulator ICANN.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which opened its annual general meeting Monday in Paris, was due to vote on the new names later on this week.

“Apart from the .com, .net or .org, the 1.3 billion web users will be able from early 2009 to acquire generic addresses by lodging common words such as .love, .hate or .city or proper names,” ICANN president Paul Twomey said.

At present “top-level domains” (TLD) are restricted to ones like .com, .org and .gov — or country codes like .uk or .fr.
Under this new proposal, many more domains like .mac, .xxx or .abc could be approved, not to mention ones like .apple, .intel and .dell.
The report notes that any string of letters would be theoretically possible, but there would be an approval process in place to prevent any abuses of the system.
On top of that, domains in different character sets like Arabic, Hebrew and the various Asian languages would also be possible.