News Room

News from Wintercorn about Joomla!, WordPress and other tech subjects

SuperfishThe adware, named Superfish, is reportedly installed on a number of Lenovo’s consumer laptops out of the box. The software injects third-party ads on Google searches and websites without the user’s permission.
Some users are reporting that the adware actually installs its own self-signed certificate authority which effectively allows the software to snoop on secure connections, like banking websites and email.
This is a bad thing because it allows the software to decrypt communications between secure sites and their users.
Tags: ,

HTTPHTTP2 is coming and the benefits are mostly performance related. 
The new standard brings a number of benefits to one of the web’s core technologies, such as faster page loads, longer-lived connections, more items arriving sooner and server push.   One notable change is that HTTP requests will be 'cheaper' to make. The web community has often told developers to avoid adding too many HTTP requests to their pages, which lead to optimization techniques like code inlining or concatenation to reduce the requests. It also allows prioritisation of requests, letting more important requests complete more quickly, further improving performance.

NSAThe NSA (the National Security Agency from the colonies, not the Norfolk Shopowners Association apparently) seems to have been meddling around with malware placed directly into users hard drives. 
The report found exploits for hard drives made by many of the largest brands in the industry, including Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Toshiba and Hitachi.
Tags: ,

Flash/HTML5It's been a long time coming, but YouTube has finally made the switch from Flash to HTML 5. You might not think it's a big deal, but it is.
Despite having long dominated web video and other interactive content, Flash has been under fire for years over performance and security issues. It doesn't work on Apple iDevices and mobile uses on other platforms are similarly restricted.
There are also security and performance issues. Steve Jobs onces said "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash." and Symantec highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records back in 2009.

RansomwareWe are all familiar with 'traditional' ransomware where a computer is encrypted and payment sought for decryption. A new trend on the market shows that criminals will now target your business website and database as well to get a ransom payment from you.
High-Tech Bridge discovered a very interesting case of a financial company website compromise: the website was out of service displaying a database error, while the website owner got an email asking for a ransom to "decrypt the database".

Contact Us

Wintercorn Consulting Limited,

The Union Building,

51-59 Rose Lane,

Norwich, Norfolk,


0800 228 9933

Wintercorn Norwich