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Sophos have been working to provide some useful tools to help to educate web users about the risks of social media sites.

There’s a Social Networking toolkit with videos and presentations that you can use to educate yourself or your workforce. And, they’ve also created a groovy little widget you can add to your webpages to share handy Safe Web Browsing browsing tips.

All this stuff is free and might just stop a few more people clicking that oh-so-appealing pop-up window or installing that rogue Facebook app that silently updates statuses and spams all their “friends”.

via Graham Cluey’s blog [SOPHOS]

Plenty of people are familiar with the dangers which can be associated with sharing your location online – whether it be by Twitter updates (“I’m at Heathrow airport, Terminal 3, waiting to go on two week’s holiday..”), Foursquare (“I just ousted @gcluley as the mayor of Sophos on @foursquare!”) and the newly launched Facebook Places.

But a new website called I Can Stalk U demonstrates how easy it is to unwittingly reveal your location – just by sharing a digital photo from your smartphone.

Many people may be unaware that lots of smart phones geo-tag photos that they take with information about where they were taken. The location data isn’t visible to the naked eye in the photo, it’s embedded as encoded meta-data inside the picture, alongside information about what type of camera was used, camera settings, and so forth.

That means, anyone who accesses your digital photos can (if you haven’t wiped the location meta-data) work out where you were when you take the snapshot.

And as many people upload their pictures virtually instantly to Twitter via services like TwitPic, someone could find out where you are even if you had no intention of sharing that information with the world.

You can imagine how that could be very dangerous – imagine if you had a jealous ex-partner, or if you were a celebrity with hundreds of demented fans keen to “hang out” with you.

The I Can Stalk U website appears to have been set up to raise awareness of the security problem, rather than to cause mischief, and they have helpfully provided information about how to disable geo-tagging on some of the most common smartphones.

As the world wide web increasingly becomes the world where web, with location playing an ever more important role in the information we glean from the internet, it will become increasingly important for net users to consider how this information is shared, and ensure that they are not unwittingly sharing it with unauthorised parties.

via Graham Cluey’s Blog [SOPHOS]

IT security and data protection firm Sophos has today released a free tool to protect against a Windows zero-day vulnerability that is being actively exploited to infect computers.

The Sophos Windows Shortcut Exploit Protection Tool protects against a high profile vulnerability that allows malicious hackers to exploit a bug in the way that all versions of Windows handles .LNK shortcut files. If Windows just displays the icon of an exploited shortcut file, malicious code can be executed – without requiring any interaction by the user.

But Sophos’s free tool, available for download from www.sophos.com/shortcut, intercepts shortcut files that contain the exploit, warning of the executable code that was attempting to run. That means it will stop malicious threats which use the vulnerability if they are on non-local disks, such as a USB stick.

Read the full article HERE

After upgrading a Sophos Antivirus solution there was an issue where you could not install the new Sophos Console 4 on a Windows 7 machine. This was a bit of a pain in the butt as the user needed to either have access to another XP/Vista machine to install a remote console or to log into the server and run the console from there. I personally wasn’t a big fan of either.

After looking up another issue on the Sophos knowledgebase I noticed a new link that happened to go off to Sophos’ brand new shiny forums. As with most forums I often feel a little let down and underwhelmed at the amout and quality of responses. As I looked through the posts (there weren’t too many as the forums had only been officialy open for a week or so) I noticed someone posting about installing the console on Windows 7. Can you imagine how happy I was to not only see a response .. but a resonse that was a working solution!

Here my friends, is how to install Console 4 on Windows 7 (if you need to know)