SECURITY

As they say in Sports, you're only as good as your DEFENSE!

Stay informed - visit Sophos and stay up to date.

If you think you are infected with a computer virus visit our virus removal page for instructions

Just because your running a anti virus program, you probably have software programs that need updates, like Adobe or Java to name a few, to find out what programs you have that need updates I recommend Secunia PSI scan (it's free), easy to use and will help in keeping your PC updated and secure.

The Internet is a jungle of malicious garbage, ranging from but not limited to
Ad Ware, Malware, Trojan Horses, Phishing, Key loggers, Ransomware and Zero Day flaws and a whole new world of SCAM artists.

For you Internet Socialites who need to use Facebook, My Space and Twitter to name a few, Web2.0 offerings, visit my page here to learn about the BARN doors you've opened.

About Ransomware - Rogue Anti Virus

Thanks to our friends at ZDNET for putting out the Ultimate Guide to Scareware Protection, take a look and review the 58 screenshots of all the wonderful bogus scareware products which could affect you or a friend.

A wonderful article from Red Tape chronicles - Give me your money or your computer get's it!

For your viewing pleasure, a video from the great Ken Colburn of Data Doctors and CNN on Scareware, Ransomware and Rouge Anti Virus Programs.

How Does Spyware, Malware or Crapware get on My Computer?

In a dozen years or so of working on home and business computers I get asked how and why people create computer garbage to infect me?

Today the good folks at the How to Geek published the best article I have ever read regarding this subject. I ask that all of you who read this spend 10 - 15 minutes reading this article.

How to remove this garbage using Spybot instructions with download link for Spybot Search and Destroy.

How to remove this garbage using Malwarebytes-Anti Malware, instructions with download link for Malwarebytes

Take the Sonic Wall Phishing quiz 10 multiple choice questions, the results might shock you.

Online scammers are making a lucrative business out of redirecting visitors from legitimate Web sites to sites that try install rogue anti virus software. Finjan's Malicious Code Research Center came across a traffic management server in Ukraine used by underground online scammers to keep track of how many redirects their rogue anti virus sites get from legitimate sites that have been compromised.

Typically, rogue anti virus software displays a message saying that the PC is infected and offering anti virus software for sale. In a successful attack, the scammers end up with the victim's credit card information and don't bother to install any legitimate software.

Members of the "affiliate network" who compromise legitimate Web sites get 9.6 cents for each successful re-direct, Finjan said in its latest Cybercrime Intelligence Report. There were 1.8 million unique users redirected to the rogue anti virus software during 16 consecutive days Finjan was monitoring the network, or about $10,800 for each day, the researchers calculated.

Finjan also discovered that between 7 percent and 12 percent of people end up installing the rogue anti virus software and 1.79 percent of them paid $50 for it.

Do you know around every 5 seconds another web site gets infected?
For details visit here.

If you are using a paid AVG anti virus protection they include a web site advisor, I recommend learning what this little add-on is all about. A free site advisor is available from McAfee for both Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox browsers. Click here for McAfee's Site Advisor's site.

If you have children at home, and they might be sharing music and pictures with their friends using Limewire or KaZaa or other programs on the computer, these file sharing programs can expose you to cybertheifs who can steal your personal information without your knowledge. The programs Limewire of KaZaa will not infect you, it's 85% plus, of the content that will. Watch this video from the NBC Today show.

If you are not using any anti-virus protection that's your choice. Did you know you can get a virus from a CD, DVD or Floppy Disk just by inserting it in your computer? When you place a media inside your computer, you should go to the My Computer icon located on your desktop, left mouse double click, locate the drive you inserted your media in, hi-lite, right mouse click and select SCAN with your anti-virus solution, to be sure it's clean.

A great feature available for free is

Is a company that offers an alternate way for your computer to get “directions” on the Internet as well as control exactly what is allowed to be accessed by your home or business network. This is one of those tools that has value for some and creates privacy concerns for others (more on that later).

DNS stands for Domain Name System and is what translates our requests in plain English into the numeric system known as IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that the Internet works on. Think of the DNS servers on the Internet as ‘traffic cops’ that are giving us all directions on how to get to our desired location. Whenever you type a web address into your browser, the first place that request goes is to your primary DNS server so it can translate your request into an IP address and send you on your way.

By default, your primary DNS server is provided to you by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and depending upon the size of the ISP, you may notice some performance increases by changing which ‘traffic cop’ you go to.

Another reason to consider OpenDNS.com is that you can control exactly what the DNS server will allow to be accessed by your computers from their web Interface. OpenDNS also automatically blocks known Phishing sites, can resolve commonly misspelled URL's and is starting to block known botnet agents such as those spread by the Conficker virus.

A home user that has three computers and wants to filter what the kids can access can change the DNS configuration on their broadband router and then log into their OpenDNS account to decide what all the computers can and cannot access. This makes it much easier for both home and business users to control content across all computers from a single point instead of having to install or configure anything on each computer. Putting DNS control at the router level also eliminates the possibility that users can figure out how to bypass a locally installed filter or parental control program.

How do I start using OpenDNS?
Take 2 minutes and change your DNS. Nothing to download or install, and OpenDNS is free. Get Started with step-by-step instructions for servers, routers, computers and more, click here.

As a reseller for AVG Internet Security, I personally have used the product for over 8 years now and I find it to be one of the BEST on the market. I highly recommend it for and too my clients.

For those of you frugal PC users AVG has a FREE Anti Virus solution for you

Something to consider when purchasing a Anti Virus Solution

With a paid subscription from AVG, technical support is excellent if you should ever require it, and it's at no cost to you.

McAfee and Norton can't say that, need assistance from them, have your credit card ready, each incident (contact) either by e-mail or telephone starts at $29.95, they neglect to inform you that when you purchase their product. When I renew my subscription with AVG I get a preferred customer discount of 35%. NICE TOUCH! Does your anti-virus solution provider offer you a discount when you renew? All AVG customers receive the 35% customer loyalty discount.

The Top 12 Threats No Computer User Should Ignore

If you are running Microsoft's Windows XP or Vista operating system, you should have your "Automatic Updates" enabled. With vulnerabilities in Microsoft's operating and office systems software, this is the only way for Microsoft to fix these exploits. For instructions on how to activate Automatic Updates click on your operating systems at the beginning of this paragraph.

Having outdated programs installed on your computer system is another open invitation to the thugs trying to infect your computer and attempt to steal your data. Like to know what's installed on your computer that's insecure, out of date or reached it's end of life? Please visit Secunia here for your free system scan. PLEASE read this: About Secunia PSI & System Requirements before proceeding.

Firewall's

Firewall's, what are they and what do they do?

A system designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network. Firewall's can be implemented in both hardware and software, or a combination of both. Firewall's are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranet's. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria. AVG's firewall with their Internet Security Suite is excellent.

There are several types of firewall techniques:

Packet filter: Looks at each packet entering or leaving the network and accepts or rejects it based on user-defined rules. Packet filtering is fairly effective and transparent to users, but it is difficult to configure. In addition, it is susceptible to IP spoofing.

Application gateway: Applies security mechanisms to specific applications, such as FTP and Telnet servers. This is very effective, but can impose a performance degradation.

Circuit-level gateway: Applies security mechanisms when a TCP or UDP connection is established. Once the connection has been made, packets can flow between the hosts without further checking.

Proxy server: Intercepts all messages entering and leaving the network. The proxy server effectively hides the true network addresses. In practice, many firewall's use two or more of these techniques in concert.

Best FREE Firewall is from Zone Alarm, click here for web site.

A firewall is considered a first line of defense in protecting private information. For greater security, data can be encrypted.

Browsers

Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decided to change the way we view things on the internet with the release of Internet Explorer 8. To say the least it’s a resource hog, if you’re running a Norton AV program expect problems every time you launch your browser, until you can address the issue and locate the correct fix. Microsoft IE8 still is non compatible with over a half million website's and Microsoft wants web designers to abandon coding standards and write sites for IE8. I would rather write sites for other browsers than IE.

Cookies

Like most humans I love cookies, usually with milk, for website administrators, owners and PC users cookies are something else entirely. A computer cookie is a small text file which contains a unique ID tag, placed on your computer by a website. The website saves a complimentary file with a matching ID tag. In this file various information can be stored, from pages visited on the site, to information voluntarily given to the site. When you revisit the site days or weeks later, the site can recognize you by matching the cookie on your computer with the counterpart in its database.

There are two types of computer cookies: temporary and permanent. Temporary cookies, also called session cookies, are stored temporarily in your browser's memory and are deleted as soon as you end the session by closing the browser. Permanent cookies, also called persistent cookies, are stored permanently on your computer's hard drive and, if deleted, will be recreated the next time you visit the sites that placed them there. By using Firefox, I delete all cookies once I close my browser out completely - nice touch.

Cookie technology addressed the need to keep track of information entered at a site so that if you submitted a registration form for example, the site could associate that information with you as you traveled through the site's pages. Otherwise, every time you clicked on a different page in the site, establishing a new connection, the site would lose the information in reference to you, forcing you to re-enter it.

Flash Cookies

Flash cookies are a new way of tracing your movement and storing a lot more information about you than with normal cookies. One major disadvantage of flash cookies is that you can’t locate them in your browser. They are not shown in the list of cookies that you can see when you take a look at the cookies that are currently saved in your web browser. Normal HTTP cookies can’t save more than 4 Kilobyte of data while Flash cookies can save up to 100 Kilobyte. If you want to try out how they work you could do the following.

Go to Youtube, increase or decrease the volume of the videos and delete all cookies afterwards. You will notice that the volume level is still at the same level when you close your browser and open it again. This is done with so called Local Shared Objects, better known as Flash cookies. The main question is of course how a computer can be checked for Flash cookies and how it would be possible to delete those cookies again.

How to remove Flash Cookies is a bit tricky, you'll need to go here to the Adobe Flash Player Settings website. All the data you will see here is contained within your PC, see image below.

At the Adobe website select the folder on the far right of your display or select from the Settings Manager on the left side of the page.

The so called Settings Manager can be accessed from the Adobe website but is running locally on your computer. The Website Storage Settings display all Flash cookies that are currently saved on your computer. You can delete flash cookies from individual sites or all at once. It is also possible to increase or decrease the Kilobyte size of all information that are stored on your computer.

Adobe does not have access to the settings that you see in the Settings Manager or to personal information on your computer.

No Flash Cookies will be saved if you go into Global Storage Settings and disable the option “Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer”. 73 website's did store Flash cookies on my computer and I decided to delete all of them and disable the feature to be on the safe site. Did you know about Flash cookies ? How many did you find on your pc ?

Firefox users - Flashblock is one of my favorite Firefox extensions. When it's active, it keeps Flash modules from loading; instead, you see clickable icons that allow you to load Flash content on a case-by-case basis. Flashblock keeps Flash out of the way when you don't want it but makes it easy to load Flash content that serves a legitimate purpose.

How effective is Flashblock against Flash Cookies? Quite a few people who use the Adobe Flash Settings Manager report finding dozens of Flash Cookies on their systems.

I found two on my system. Both loaded on sites where I deliberately allowed Flash content to load after Flashblock had flagged it.

Another Firefox security extension does what Adobe refuses to do: Give desktop users direct, local control of their Flash Cookie settings. Among other features, the Better Privacy extension provides detailed information about every Flash Cookie stored on a user's system, can auto-wipe downloaded Flash Cookies on startup or shutdown, and supports whitelistng objects that users want to keep around.

Privacy issues aside, however, it is simply impossible to practice sound desktop computer security without two key ingredients: knowledge and control. And that is why Flashblock, Better Privacy, and so many other Firefox extensions are such a boon for security-conscious Web users

I’m not a fan of Microsoft; while they made the solution (Windows) they also create the problems with much vulnerability. Reading these messages which are a weekly occurrence “A serious flaw has been found in Windows systems, leaving unsuspecting user’s potentially wide open to drive-by downloads” and as usual there is no patch yet from Microsoft. Such as this malware attack first noted on July 3, 2009.

What is a rootkit?

A rootkit may consist of spyware and other programs that: monitor traffic and keystrokes; create a "backdoor" into the system for the hacker's use; alter log files; attack other machines on the network; and alter existing system tools to escape detection. The presence of a rootkit on a network was first documented in the early 1990s. At that time, Sun and Linux operating systems were the primary targets for a hacker looking to install a rootkit. Today, rootkits are available for a number of operating systems, including Windows, and are increasingly difficult to detect on any network.

Keep yourself safe, abandon IE8 except for Microsoft updates and use Firefox by Mozilla.

A Healthy Computer

Is up to date with all it's software updates, visit these links below for updates and to see how vulnerable your PC is. If you have no Anti-Virus program running I highly recommend you obtain AVG 9.0 free version.

• Microsoft Windows Update
• Secunia Vulnerability Scanner
• AVG 9.0 Free Anti Virus
• How to Remove a Computer Virus

If you do not run a anti virus program what's the use of running a personal computer.

Require AVG for multiple computers more than 3 (volume licensing) or servers contact us for details and pricing.