Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Computers

  • Search engines to blame for malware spread?

    There are a couple news stories about a McAfee SiteAdvisor report about the search engines responsibility for sites that distribute malware.

    McAfee said Friday that the epidemic of spyware and viruses could be linked to search engines. According to research from the company, even seemingly benign search terms could bring up sites loaded with nasty payloads.

    The study looked at the five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask — and covered a period from January through April. Researchers found that in every search engine, popular keywords returned sites that could be potentially dangerous.

    What’s worse, in popular keywords such as “free screensavers,” “digital music,” “popular software,” and “singers,” as much as 72 percent of the returned results contained some kind of risky link.

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  • Diebold Voting machine vulnerabilities

    Freedom to tinker brings us this BIG problem. I guess what concerns me most about this, is the way I see it, voter fraud has pretty much gone on since there have been elections. Let’s face it, there is always someone, acting officially or not that will jockey for the best advantage for their candidate. If that means “helping” someone cast a ballot, or contesting a hanging chad… it cuts both ways, no party has clean hands in this. (Even if it’s something that is done by someone acting on their own, I would say it reflects back on the party.) Anyway… up until know I’ve seen voter fraud as something that is hard to really successfully accomplish on a VERY large scale, AND with assurance of results. With electronic voting machines, I’m afraid there may be a revolution in MASS voter fraud.

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  • A couple interesting online Advertising notes

    I’ve run across a couple of interesting things. The first was linked to from the second one I’ll mention. I know, some time back, I visited a publicly available Google Adsense tool a few months back and at that time found an interesting tool that gave you keyword suggestions based on a term or keyword that you supplied. Interesting and very likely it gave results that you might not have thought of without the tool. However, I don’t recall being able to get quite as much information as it appears they give now…

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  • Microsoft fixes security fix….

    Well, for the second month in a row (I don’t recall one in March..) Microsoft has re-released a patch for Windows. This time it’s the Flash patch (which really falls under 3rd party software). They’ve re-worked the version detection of the update in an attempt to solve all the problems that people have run into with this update. The MS Security blog information is here.

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  • Federal requirement to disclose database security breaches?

    Fines and prison time are among the penalties envisioned under a proposed house bill. The requirement would be that businesses with database holding information on more than 10,000 people (or federal employees) would have to inform either the Secret Service or the FBI of a data security breach. (The maximum sentence would be five years.) Now, on my first read of this, I thought, well sure – any company should disclose the possible loss, theft, or breach of a database holding customer data. I still think that… but I don’t know that the focus of penalty is on the right shoulders.

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  • Interesting spyware push download tactic…

    Incidents.org has another interesting post about a spyware site. One of the handlers ran across it while doing a search for an educational institution. (They’ve used a wildcard in the dns record so that they can get traffic to {fillinkeyword}.nastydomain.com) Anyway… the main page tries to install WinAntiSpyware2006FreeInstall.cab from WinSoftware Corporation, Inc. It gives the little ActiveX control popdown bar and insists that it must be installed to view the page properly. But that’s not the most interesting part…

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  • Antispyware products put to a test

    There is no doubt that spyware is a problem, but when a vendor of anti-spyware software claims 87% of pcs have on average 34 pieces of spyware per machine installed…… you do have to wonder. And when they claim that in part on FREE anti-spyware software…..

    “Security analysts blame this increasing infection rate on the adoption of free anti-spyware programs that use outdated technology and don’t provide immediate threat definitions to combat against new and emerging threats. To guard against new spyware programs, home computer users must use an anti-spyware program with frequent definition updates and engines that are capable of removing the toughest spyware from deep within the operating system. Unfortunately, users who only install free anti-spyware programs do not get access to frequently updated definitions and versions.”

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  • Another problem with one of the Microsoft Patches…

    Last month, April, the Microsoft patch cycle had one problem patch that broke certain explorer extensions (most notable some HP software…) This time around it looks like the Flash patch that they distributed has given a few people fits. For starters, yes it’s odd for Microsoft to distribute a patch for a 3rd party product.

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  • Detecting Rootkits on a Linux machine

    Rootkits are a piece (or pieces) of software that someone can be used once a system is compromised to a) regain access to a system and b) remove traces of a compromise and c) many times hide itself. There are some tools for linux based systems that can be run to detect traces of rootkits and probably the best known is a tool called chkrootkit. I’ve know of it for what seems like years now and it can run a relatively quick test for traces of a wide range of KNOWN linux rootkits.

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  • Sandbox your browser on a linux system

    While I was reading about browser sandboxing coming up in Vista and musing about how easy or difficult it would be to sandbox OTHER 3rd party applications, I found a comment on a ZDNet post that I think I’ll just copy directly (of course, giving credit to the poster…) Of course, with the user seperation under linux, individual users have NO access to other users folders by default. ONLY the administrator can access individual user folders. So, you obviously don’t want to run a web browser as the administrator (root), but you could setup another user account to run your web browser under if you’re particularly concerned about isolating it from NOT just the system files, but YOUR files as well.

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