Archive for July, 2009
How to Remove a Computer Virus
If you suspect you have a virus (or any other malware), you should take steps immediately. The following procedures work for most malware (except perhaps for completely new, unknown or unusually malignant strains). It is better to complete all steps, so you can be (reasonably) sure that all traces have been removed.
Signs to look out for (infections may cause one or several of the following):
- Slow computer, and/or slow internet connection.
- Strange pop-ups or web browser redirections (beyond those expected from dodgy websites).
- Program failure, or inexplicable errors (even after a fresh install).
- System functions unavailable (eg: Control Panel, Task Manager, Internet Explorer).
- System giving a “RPC error”, giving a window with a 30 second countdown to a restart.
- Excessive internet cap usage, i.e high internet traffic on your computer.
Google Apps is Finally Out of beta
It’s been more than five years and Google applications such as Gmail has finally decided to lift the “beta” from it’s logo’s. Although they remove the beta from logo’s, they did mention “the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase.”
[Source: GoogleBlog, Image]
Identity Theft Made Easy with Facebook
Be careful with social networking sites like facebook and myspace. A recent study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proves that a social security number can be guessed based on the individual’s date of birth and birthplace.
Consider, for instance, an attacker who rented a small botnet (10,000 IP addresses) to apply for credit cards impersonating 18-year-old West Virginia-born U.S. residents (whose state and
dates of birth he has obtained from commercial databases). Assuming that an IP address gets blacklisted by an online credit card issuer after 3 incorrect attempts, that the criminal distributes his or her attacks across 20 issuers and can find birth data for 50% of the potential targets, and that inquiries with the correct first 7 of 9 digits are sufficient for a CRA to answer with a positive match in 50% of the cases, he could harvest credentials at rates as high as 47 per minute, obtaining [approximately equal to] 4,000 credentials within 2 h before his or her IPs are blacklisted…
