วันอาทิตย์ที่ 7 ธันวาคม พ.ศ. 2551

The Top Twelve Threats No Computer User Should Ignore

The internet is undoubtedly a fantastic resource for families and offers a rich vein of educational content.

However, there are potential dangers - welcome to the seedy world of viruses, spam, trojans, pornography, spyware and other nasties.

These are the Top Twelve Threats No Computer User Should Ignore.

1. Viruses - A computer program that copies itself. They often disrupt your computer system or damage your data. Viruses are usually received by email attachments so be careful opening anything from a dubious source. They can affect anyone, for example, the destructive Mydoom worm affected one out of three small and mid-sized businesses.

2. Spyware - Sends information about you and your computer to somebody else. Spyware may send the addresses of sites you have visited or worse still, transmit personal information. With today's concerns about identify theft this is a real worry. For example, CoolWebSearch may hijack web searches, home page, and other Internet Explorer settings. Spyware is normally received as part of shareware or freeware downloaded from the web.

3. IP Spoofing - A technique to gain unauthorized access to computers, whereby the intruder sends messages to a computer with an address indicating that the message is coming from a trusted host.

4. Trojans - An apparently legitimate computer program that is really intended to disrupt and damage computer activity by sending information, perhaps even passwords onto a third party without you knowing. As an example, recent emails entitled "Osama Bin Laden Captured" attempted to download the "Trj/Small.B." Trojan if the embedded URL was clicked. This trojan attempts to hijack the PC.

5. Spam - Unsolicited mail often promoting products of a dubious financial or sexual nature. Don't leave your email address on websites and internet bulletin boards as they are harvested by spammers.

6. Adware - puts advertisements on your screen. These take many forms including popups, popunders and advertisements that appear later, even if your browser is closed. Some are sent using the Windows Messenger service which allows a spammer to direct an advertisement straight to your computer by sequentially sending messages to IP addresses. Always irritating, they are also often of a pornographic nature.

7. Diallers - for those of us still with dial up modems, dialler programs redirect calls to a very expensive number. You won't know until you get the bill.

8. Hijackers - Hijackers take control of your web browser and may reset your home page, search bar and search pages. They can redirect you to undesirable sites or stop you going to particular sites.

9. Hackers - With so much personal data available online to anyone with a password you must be sure your password is secure. If you are using your mother's maiden name, your cat's name or your birthday then your password is at risk. Here are two tips for making a secure password. Method One - pick two random unrelated three letter words and two digits. Mix them up and what do you have? A secure password such as "red19cat" or "hotpin73". Method Two - pick a short sequence of words such as Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent Made Glorious' and you have a password of "nitwoodmg". You could even change the I's and O's to digits.

10. Phishing - Emails purporting to come from reliable sources such as Paypal, Ebay or your bank. Often wanting you to verify your account details, they can look very realistic but are generally scams to harvest usernames and passwords. Always open a new browser winder and type the address there, rather than clicking on the link provided.

11. Hoaxes - Chain letters, scams, false alarms. At best they take up time and bandwidth but at worst vulnerable can be victims of fraud. Pass it on!

12. Stranger-danger – For those of us with children - do you know what they actually do when they are online? Are they working on homework tasks, downloading illegal music or pornography? Or are they chatting to strangers in chat rooms? You should consider blocking access to undesirable sites and logging their activity with a surveillance tool. Oh, and don't forget that where children are concerned, computers should always be kept in a family room and never in their bedroom.

Three Step Action Plan

There are three basic, essential steps that should be taken to ensure your PC is kept threat-free.

Firstly , be sensible when opening attachments or following email instructions from apparently reputable sites.

Secondly , make sure you are using the latest service pack of Windows as Microsoft is continually closing loopholes to tighten up security.

Finally, there's a range of low cost tools such as firewalls, antivirus, spam blockers and spyware killers available. Like everything else they vary in quality and you tend to get what you pay for so always do your research first and perhaps try a free trial before getting your credit card out.

The author, Kai Chandler, edits http://www.surfcontrols.com which specializes in providing reviews and recommendations of top-rated tools to help protect your online experience.

[tags]pornography, viruses,,Hoaxes , Phishing , Hackers , Hijackers , Diallers , Adware ,Spam ,Trojan[/tags]

Spyware Attacks! Windows Safe Mode Is No Longer Safe

Many of us have run into an annoying and time-consuming error. With your machine running goofey you decide to run a scan for trojans and spyware. Following the scan, which usually takes fourty minutes or longer if you scan the entire system, you are hit with the "access denied" error. Frustrating, for sure, but being the savvy computer user that you are you decide to boot to safe mode to take care of the issue. No spyware can load when booted to safe mode, right?

Wrong.

The newer variants of the CoolWebSearch, HuntBar, and VX2 infections all load even when safe mode is used. There are a few different ways of accomplishing this, the most common being that the spyware registers itself as a critical system process. This ensures that it is loaded regardless of what happens, and makes it much harder to shut down.

If you can't prevent it from loading then how do you kill it? The answer to that is easier than it might seem. If you're running Windows 98 or ME, then the easiest way is to boot to DOS, and use a command-line scanner to search your hard drive. These scans actually tend to run a bit faster, since they have more system resources available to them courtesy of no GUI being loaded.

"Well, that's all fine and dandy", you're likely thinking to yourself, "I run Windows XP. You can't read it from DOS." True. You can't read NTFS hard disks from DOS. However, you can use Barts PE.

Barts PE is effectively a stripped version of Windows XP. It boots completely from a CD, and loads a simple graphical user interface. Coupled with plugins, McAfee, for example, you can scan your entire computer without the fear that your nifty little infection has somehow loaded.

For more information on how to setup Barts PE and McAfee within it, visit:

http://www.tweaksforgeeks.com/Setup_Barts_PE.html

http://www.tweaksforgeeks.com/Barts_PE_McAfee_Setup.html

Kevin Souter is a full time computer repair technician. He also operates a free spyware removal site, as well as a general computer repair site.

[tags]Spyware,spyware removal,Barts PE,virus,McAfee,spyware scanner[/tags]