WinPatrol 2008 introduced in its 10th year

According to eWeek.com WinPatrol is one of the 10 Free Must-Have Security Tools. “This ultimate watchdog program monitors Windows computers for signs of malicious hacker activity”. The new WinPatrol 2008 continues to be the Swiss Army Knife of Window utilities with the addition of its ActiveX manager.

It seems like every week more problems are reported in Quicktime, RealPlayer, Adobe Flash, Sun’s Java or other 3rd party controls. Once the vulnerability is known the risk increases exponentially until a patch is available. WinPatrol 2008 takes the worry out of waiting for a patch to become available. When a vulnerability is found Scotty will let you disable or set the “kill-bit” on the appropriate control until a new one is made available.

WinPatrol 2008 will also monitor your system and let you know when new ActiveX components try to make their home on your system. If it’s not something you wanted WinPatrol will kill the new component before it can do any damage.

Thanks to feedback from everyone who helped test WinPatrol 2008 including our volunteers who localize WinPatrol for our friends around the world. Thank you as well to staff at ars technica for including WinPatrol in their article "Five important security apps for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows" While this article implies WinPatrol is the equivalent of (User Account Control(UAC) for Windows XP it’s still a nice mention.

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WinPatrol 2008 ActiveX Beta

Later this week I plan to release the first beta of the next version of WinPatrol, called WinPatrol 2008. This test phase will be limited but you can request access by Emailing support@winpatrol.com. Include basic information about your system and any special talents you might have. PLUS members will naturally be given priority but it’s not a requirement.

The big new feature in WinPatrol 2008 will be monitoring and control of your ActiveX components. Even our friends at Symantec recently reported ActiveX account for an overwhelming majority of all browser plug-in vulnerabilities. Microsoft controls made up 79% of the 239 plug-in bugs discovered the last half of 2007. Those problems were followed by Apples’ Quicktime which had 19 vulnerabilities patched last year.

It seems like every week more problems are reported in Quicktime, RealPlayer, Adobe Flash, Sun’s Java or other 3^rd party controls. Once the vulnerability is known the risk increases exponentially until a patch is available.

WinPatrol 2008 Beta 1

WinPatrol 2008 takes the worry out of waiting for a patch to become available. When a vulnerability is found Scotty will let you disable or set the “kill-bit” on the appropriate control until a new one is made available.

One of the tasks for each tester will be to go through the list of ActiveX controls and just click on PLUS Info. That will provide us with a list of most commonly used controls so our research department can have data available for all PLUS members by release time. Our research director Robin doesn’t know it yet but we’ll all be working a little overtime.

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FlashPix ActiveX ZeroDay Fix

My good buddy Alex over at Sunbelt Software alerted me to a new Zero Day vulnerability that has been announced by US-Cert(United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team). The bug was discovered and demonstrated yesterday by Krystian Kloskowski.

This is the kind of infection that can occur just by going to the wrong web page or reading an HTML document. You don’t have to download or agree to anything for this kind of threat to attack your computer.

The flaw was found in a file “DXTLIPI.DLL” which may or may not exist on your computer. This file is the container of an ActiveX control from Live Picture Corporation known as “FlashPix”.

The only available solution requires a change in the registry so the current version of this ActiveX will not be executed by Internet Explorer.

For those who aren’t comfortable using Regedit, I have created a registry script which will make the change for you. Just run the following to protect your computer. You can also save it to your computer and run it after download.

http://www.winpatrol.com/support/flashpixoff.reg

This script will set the kill bit for this ActiveX definition. If you’re using Netscape, it won’t run the script, it will just display the text contained in the script. Of course, if you’re using Netscape, you don’t have to worry about it anyway.

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