Microsoft faces $5m-a-day fine

European Union authorities could fine Microsoft $5 million per day if the company is unduly slow to apply measures imposed against it a year ago, reports AFP.

The European Commission will decide in two weeks what action to take against Microsoft. It has powers enabling it to apply a fine of up to 5% of Microsoft`s average daily sales throughout the world.

In March last year, the commission imposed a fine of 497 million euros against the company, which it paid in December. However, the commission accused the company last week of not complying with some of the measures against it.

A vulnerability has been discovered in the McAfee AntiVirus library that is used in many corporate desktop, server and gateway products, reports NewsFactor.

The problem appears when a malformed file in the compressed LHA format is processed by the AntiVirus library. When such an event occurs, a stack overflow can be triggered, allowing an attacker to execute malicious code.

Successful exploit of the McAfee vulnerability could lead to unauthorised access to networks and machines that are protected by the McAfee AntiVirus library product.

Apple has issued a security update for Mac OS X v10.3.8 that fixes several issues with the operating system, including a vulnerability in its Safari Web browser.

The update also addresses several other problems with the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, reports MacCentral.

It prevents look-alike characters from being used to spoof the URL displayed in the address field, SSL certificate or status bar of the Safari browser.

The update provides a user-editable list of scripts that can be displayed natively in domain names. The default list does not include Latin look-alike scripts (Cherokee, Cyrillic and Greek) that could be used to trick users into navigating to malicious sites.