Popular Applications Are Creating Holes In Your OS

Nearly every computer owner nowadays knows how to keep their computer safe by running regualar virus scans and keeping spyware scanners up to date. Well researchers at Prinston University say that this is not enough. They have found many popular applications which open doors up to allow various attacks.

Among the discovered culprits were Adobe Photoshop and AOL Instant Messengar. Fortuneately, these products which had the worst written code out of all those which were found, have fixed their code.

Earlier this month, Ed Felten who is a professor of computer science and public affairs, responded by saying:



However, none of these vuneralbilites can be exploited over the web but require local access to the machine; it goes to show that even the most conscientious of computer users are ultimately at the mercy of the programs they use.

LEARN MORE: http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/5347/

wow this is pretty intresting. ill be sure to check it out. im glad it says that photoshoped fixed their problems. but this is kinda stupid. i heard something about msn messenger too one time. i think messengers are a vulnerable more easily than other programs.

anyways thanks for sharing this.

Yeah, shows you can never be too careful. Start-up programs are a pain too - and if they're making security holes, I'd be damned if I ever allowed anything to run on startup.

yeah just lightening your startup and decrease a great ammount of holes. and you can always have a faster startup...just makes using the computer more fun.

most of the applications that "create" security holes are the ones with just bad programming as those researchers had found. a big cause of this is that when programmers at a company begin programming, they follow bad syntax or don't want to fix it. eventually as they build onto the code they had already done...it's a big jumble of pieces of programming that causes ties in machines and just creates problems. If companies spent the time (and money) in which most cases they won't, to re code their programs more organized....they'd probably have less problems.

just a lesson for all of you programmers out there......be neat from the start and follow correct syntax.

oh no I aint updated my photoshop thou but I have photoshop cs (which aint been updated since I got it) does that mean im ok?

I wouldn't worry about it too much. If your Photoshop has worked alright thus far, chances are they will for awhile yet. I'm not exactly sure what kind of holes are being referred to by this guy; security holes, code holes, or what? Regardless, I'm perfectly willing to give my favorite application developers time to fix the errors with patches instead of going on a fuming rant about how the program wasn't perfect the first time.

I agree with Cerebral Stasis, I cannot let the Application get a bad name the application developers will definitely develop the required patches if any such problems really exixted. How can anyone just leave using applications like Photoshop which has become a part of our life and I like to spend hours on it.

i think you have all the reason, all computers are vulnerable, even more if you run pirate applications from the internet via p2p software, often, i'm afraid to install several programs i download from the net, and that's because if a program gets to trash my computer i have a lot of information, and also it means to reconfigure your system and that is an expensive time task.

now i have a good antivirus, or i think it, at least, it shows advertencies from a hacker that wants to get-in into my computer, and almost forgot, i have activated the system recovery option in my os, so when something stupid happends in my machine, i simply recover the system to the last registration point where the system was perfect, but sometimes it doesn't work, so i open the systemworks by symantec and perform all the tasks it ask, it has saved me a lot of times to have to reconfigure my system, and off cours a lot of time and suffering. at last all the methods mencioned below doesn' work, i take the way of pain, restart the system, reinstall all the software, go back into trap 17 and remember my user name an my password to the browser, do the same thing with other site, reinstall all the windows patches, reconfigure my mail client and all that things that now i can't remember.

at last, i would like to know how a bad software can make holes in your OS, so i would like if someone teach me about it, thanks!

this is quite an interesting topic and after having read the article i kinda feel insecure with my internet security suite that i m using at present

however, i do think that internet applicatiosn like messengers and p2p file sharing progs, browsers are more vulnerable than softwares that do not directly connect to the internet
coz such softwares are updated regularly and i must believe that they try to fix these loop holes in their software