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by Paul Ducklin The venerable RAR program, short for Roshal’s Archiver after its original creator, has been popular in file sharing and software distribution circles for decades, not least because of its built-in error recovery and file reconstruction features. Early internet users will remember, with little fondness, the days when large file transfers were shipped either as compressed archives split across multiple floppy disks, or uploaded to size-conscious online forums as a series of modestly-sized…

by Paul Ducklin SING US A CYBERSECURITY SONG Why your Mac’s calendar app says it’s JUL 17. One patch, one line, one file. Careful with that {axe,file}, Eugene. Storm season for Microsoft. When typos make you sing for joy. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere that…

by Paul Ducklin The second-ever Apple Rapid Security Response just came out. That’s where the very latest versions of macOS, iOS and iPadOS get emergency patches that: Don’t take as long for Apple to build, test and publish as a full version update would. Don’t take as long to download when you decide to fetch them. Don’t take as long to install and activate when you actually apply them. Don’t make irreversible changes that can’t…

by Paul Ducklin It’s taken more than five years for justice to be served in this case, but the cops and the courts got there in the end. The UK law enforcement office SEROCU, short for South East Regional Organised Crime Unit, this week reported the peculiar tale of one Ashley Liles, the literal Man in the Middle whom we referred to in the headline. These days, we usually expand the jargon term MitM to…

by Paul Ducklin Microsoft’s May 2023 Patch Tuesday updates comprise just the sort of mixture you probably expected. If you go by numbers, there are 38 vulnerabilities, of which seven are considered critical: six in Windows itself, and one in SharePoint. Apparently, three of the 38 holes are zero-days, because they’re already publicly known, and at least one of them has already been actively exploited by cybercriminals. Unfortunately, those criminals seem to include the notorious…

by Paul Ducklin We’ve written about the uncertainty of Apple’s security update process many times before. We’ve had urgent updates accompanied by email notifications that warned us of zero-day bugs that needed fixing right away, because crooks were already onto them… …but without even the vaguest description of what sort of criminals, and what they were up to, which would at least help to round out the story. Our approach has therefore been simply to…