Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Tools of the Trade - Resistant to the GSK Vaccine

A drug company announces it has tested a vaccine that appears to protect against the different forms bird flu might take, which could be the key to preventing a pandemic.

Researchers from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) at the IX International Symposium on Respiratory Viral Infections in Hong Kong this week revealed that a new vaccine that had previously proved effective in protecting people against a strain of H5N1 bird flu from Vietnam also protected them from another bird flu variant isolated in Indonesia. "These two strains, when evaluated for antigenic relatedness, showed an eight- to 16-fold difference for a reference antiserum," says Bruce Innis, vice president and director of clinical research and development and medical affairs at GSK Biologicals. In other words, the vaccine protected the blood from 400 volunteers from two very different strains of bird flu.

On to the tools...

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1) On March 6th, ClamAV 0.90.1 was released. The 0.9x series introduces lots of improvements in terms of detection rate and performance, like support for many new packers and decryptors, RAR3 and SIS archives, and a new phishing signatures format that proves to be very effective.

2) On March 5th, GnuPG.org released GnuPG 1.4.7. This release fixes the serious security issue discovered by Gerardo Richarte from Core Security Technologies.

3) On March 1st, Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 was released. This release includes several security fixes.

4) On Feb 27th, ModSecurity 2.1.0 was released. The latest version of ModSecurity includes significant performance improvements along with many improvements and bug fixes. However, Stefan Esser discovered a security issue with this exact version and released it via the MoPB project.

5) On Feb 24th, JBroFuzz 0.5 was released. JBroFuzz is a stateless network protocol fuzzer that emerged from the needs of penetration testing. Written in Java, it allows for the identification of certain classess of security vulnerabilities, by means of creating malformed data and having the network protocol in question consume the data.

6) On Feb 23th, Firefox 2.0.0.2 was released. This release was in response to several security issues. Check out the release notes for all the details.

7) On Feb 23th, Remote-Exploit.org released Wyd. The general idea of Wyd is to personalize or profile the available data about a "target" person or system and generate a wordlist of possible passwords/passphrases out of the available information.

8) In beta news, 7-Zip 4.44 Beta was released on Jan 20th.

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