It started with Michael Coppola taking things apart at the age of five: the remote control, his mother's house lamps, the family's VCR. He was curious about how things worked. By the time he was in fourth grade, he moved on to software. After building Web sites for his parents and their friends, Coppola, now 17, decided to try his hand at hacking. "When you have this passion for technology, you're not satisfied with knowing how to use something, you want to know how it works," he says.
Microsoft warned of a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer that is already being exploited by hackers, the second such admission in the last two months.
Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and its 2006 successor, IE7, contain a vulnerability that can be used by attackers to inject their own malicious code into a Windows PC. The oldest and newest of Microsoft's supported browsers, IE 5.01 and IE8, respectively, are not at risk from attack.
Opera Software will soon patch a vulnerability in its Web browser that could allow an attacker to run malicious software on a Windows computer.
The problem affects Opera browser version 10.50 running on Windows and possibly others, according to an advisory from Danish security company Secunia said.
Opera said two Windows security features -- Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) -- can make it more difficult to compromise a computer.
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