Extempore

Dubai Police arrested a gang of Arab men, who stole over 200 million dirhams using credit cards doing online shopping, Gulf News said.

They were tipped off in August about the guys, and caught most of them now (one out of four is out of the country).

Dear all,

This blog is a bit quiet, since I am on a short trip in Jakarta, Indonesia. I’m visiting a friend of mine and it is a nice break from the busy Dubai life.

Plus, I met some cool people at the Bellua Cyber Security Asia 2008 conference.

Thanks,
Michael

A newly discovery vulnerability made Microsoft release a security patch aside from it’s usual cycle, the notorious Patch Tuesday. This “Patch Tuesday” is normally every second Tuesday of the month.

MS08-067 fixes a bug in the RPC handling of the Windows Server service.

The bug was deemed as “critical” on pre-Vista machines, which is still the majority of Windows clients.

Multiple banks issues SMS messages and emails for UAE customers to change their PIN codes. Some banks even disabled international ATM cash withdrawal (which would suck if you’re on a holiday and need cash).

So, if you are living in the UAE; it never hurts to change your pin. Which is something you should do on a regular basis anyways.

An Egyptian secretary guessed the password of a yahoo account of an Emirati UN employee, and was sentenced to three months in jail and deportation.

The “hacker” emailed the victim that he broke into her email account, and was going to release pictures and “other secrets” of her, according to GulfNews.

Not the cybercrime caliber of russian extremist webmasters being “accidentially” executed, but still.