attention windows users!

the last year ended with a major vulnerability in M$ windows, and the new year starts with snowballing pieces of malware out there exploiting it. if you haven't heard about the "WMF exploit" yet, get yourself to this link and follow the instructions to apply the unofficial patch and deregister shimgvw.dll -- this is really serious, and you won't even be safe if you don't run IE or outlook, which are the usual vectors for such crap. this can hit you through other browsers as well. website for the unofficial patch, which might be more up-to-date than the first link by the time you're reading this. remember that you did this, when M$ comes out with their official patch, you'll want to undo both these changes.

generally it's a good idea to have Windows Data Execution Prevention turned on, which keeps data from executing in areas already marked as storage (which is how buffer overflow exploits usually work). in XP SP2 you do that via start -> control panel -> system, tab advanced, performance region settings button, tab data execution prevention, radio button Select Turn on DEP for all programs and services except for those I select. you don't have to add anything there unless you're debugging code. reboot after applying changes (one reboot for all 3 actions, the two above and this one will do :).