{"id":2020,"date":"2003-09-24T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-09-24T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/?p=2020"},"modified":"2021-05-26T03:02:53","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T07:02:53","slug":"dcombobulate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/2003\/09\/24\/dcombobulate\/","title":{"rendered":"DCOMbobulate"},"content":{"rendered":"\n    Skeptical as I am about unknown e-mail attachments, even I was puzzled by the latest file sent to me from “support@microsoft.com”. The e-mail [My Life as a Fischer<\/b> has an example<\/a> of it] looked official enough and, stranger still, Norton AntiVirus did not flag the file as infected. I nevertheless did not run the attachment, of course, and I wasn’t surprised, afterward, to find out the attachment was indeed yet another variant of the MS Blast worm.
    Evidently all these worms in the MS Blast family want to exploit vulnerabilities in DCOM, a component that allows networked computer to communicate. Since DCOM would hardly ever be used in a home environment there’s no reason for it to be running at all. But Microsoft, instead of deactivating it, has concentrated on distributing patches that simply rewrite the code. DCOMbobulate<\/a>, another great free utility from GRC.com<\/a>, is a small program that will<\/i> deactivate DCOM for you, eliminating the vulnerability that MS Blast-type worms try to exploit. It’s a quick and painless and highly recommended. Why leave something running that you will never use?\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Skeptical as I am about unknown e-mail attachments, even I was puzzled by the latest file sent to me from “support@microsoft.com”. The e-mail [My Life as a Fischer has an example of it] looked official enough and, stranger … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links","category-tech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2021,"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wastinaway.net\/shortfatguy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}