VictorSawma.com: Blog about Web, Security and Life

25 Sep, 2009

Did you lose access to your Hotmail / MSN / Live account and cannot reset your password using normal techniques (like Secret Question / Answer or Alternate Email)?

If yes, here is the link that allows you to "try" to recover your account by contacting Microsoft directly.

https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlidvalidation&ct=eformcs

Click on the link above and fill in as much information as possible. Make sure you use an email address that you have access to. The more information you provide (contacts in your address book, folders, email activity, etc.) the more convincing your request will be for the staff member who will be reviewing your request.

Normally, if convinced, Microsoft will simply reset your account password and send it over to the email address that you provide. Pay attention not to get confused between the stolen account email address and the email address that you want to receive the recovered password on.

4 Dec, 2008

Yesterday, I gave a seminar entitled "Ethical Hacking: It's All About the Ethics". What I really enjoyed about the seminar was the amount of interest that the topic had on students as well as the questions asked during and after the seminar.

I received today some pictures about the event and are available under the Albums Section.

28 Oct, 2008

I am writing this article in here so that everyone else out there can be aware of this SCAM and FRAUDULENT company named Emerald Who's Who. These people are very professional at their SCAM business to the extent that you will feel very stuck in their deal. I was almost caught yesterday except for this small silly mistake that they did and got my defensive mechanisms up.

If you are intereseted in this story, click to read more. If you are not intereseted in the details, simply be aware of anybody calling you over your phone from a company named Emerald Who's Who.

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24 Sep, 2008

I found an interesting article written by Marius Oiaga, related to Internet Explorer security, and addresses the existence of what can be called "Ghosts".

Whether you believe in ghosts or not is irrelevant from a browser point of view. The matter is that you'd better start believing because Microsoft's browsers allow "ghosts" to take more than a peek over your shoulder, in fact, it permits them to see and register every move associated with the browsing process. Secunia has published an advisory titled "Internet Explorer 7 Frame Location Handling Vulnerability" warning of the risks faced by IE users, but not only IE7 is affected. Exploits have also been tested with success on IE6 and even on IE8 Beta 1. And to top it all off, a sample proof of concept is available in the wild at (http://sirdarckcat.blogspot.com/2008/05/ghosts-for-ie8-and-ie75730.html) [You must be using Internet Explorer for this demo to work]. (More)

13 May, 2008

Two days ago, on Sunday night, Roland, a friend of mine, called me and said that the lebanese-forces.com website was under a heavy denial of service attack and that they were receiving emails from Hezbollah advertising the attack and asking them to shut down the website. My natural reply to his request was to meet so that I can help in any way possible. One hour later, we met at my place and the process of restoring the website started. It turned out that Hezbollah was not the party attacking the website. How was this deduced?
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5 Apr, 2008

This is just an alert about emails that are being sent to many people that I know regarding Billing Information for Google Adwords. The email is asking people to visit a website that looks exactly like the Google Adwords website and asks visitors to login and update their credit card information. Pay attention not to fall for this.

Moreover, I will list below the URLs of the emails contained in the link with the hope that they get blocked soon:

• adwords.google.com.x855ws.cn/select/step1.php
  Apparently blocked on Apr. 6.
• www.adwords.google.com.oiloc.cn/select/Login/

7 Apr, 2006

It has come to my attention lately that many hosting companies in Lebanon do not implement the domain locking policy that was recommended by ICANN back in 2004. In this article, I will simply state what ICANN (Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers) has to say about this topic and about its importance.
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