I know I saw this yesterday somewhere (The Register?), but….. According to this article, proof of concept viruses have already been written for Monad, which is Microsoft’s next revision of the command shell. Now, there is some hesitance to call these viruses the first that would affect Windows Vista because it’s not known when Monad will ship (it may first ship as part of Exchange 12 server).
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Category: Viruses
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Windows Vista virus
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Grisoft AVG Antivirus and other antivirus alternatives
Okay, so we know that having an antivirus scanner on a windows desktop is VERY necessary. Especially if it’s a system that has any contact with the outside world. So, what to choose. Well, of course there’s Symantec Norton Antivirus, there’s McAfee and a few other less well known (Kaspersky, F-Prot, Innoculate-IT) I’m rather fond of Grisoft’s AVG Antivirus though. Here are a number of reasons (more…)
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Virus Hoaxes are almost as bad as real viruses
I suspect you’ve probably got a fair share of these, I know I pull my hair out everytime I see someone forward one to their closest 400 friends and include me. Virus warnings. Viruses, are something that I deal with cleaning up quite a bit and I guess people try to help, but most of the time circulated virus warnings through email are hoaxes. I have seen one in particular crop up every now and then that directs the user to find and delete a file on the drive which is actually a harmless file distributed with Windows.
But how to tell the wheat from the chaff so to speak?
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Sending Virus or Spam Abuse reports
It occured to me that I may not have brought things to a neat conclusion on the post earlier about tracking email header data. I did make reference to sending an abuse report. Here’s an attempt to clear up a few things that might still be fuzzy.
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Modern Computer Viruses are almost NEVER from whom they claim to be from
This is one that I’ve probably talked about before, but it’s worth rehashing because of a call I had this afternoon. A customer had been receiving phone calls and email messages from folks asking that he stop sending them a virus. Essentially all of the viruses were claiming to be from his email address and he was very concerned that his system had been compromised.
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More on the virus/trojan front
I have a couple new things to post. One, in my futher investigation of the server logs, from the last big topic…. (read the entries below.) I’ve discovered at least one MAC, so this should be a warning that no one should take system security for granted. Likely someone has installed a rootkit of some sort on that machine, as I know of no virus or trojan that is cross-platform in it’s ability to be a spam helper.
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Progress…
Well, things are shaping up a little better today on some fronts. My webhosting provider apologized for the offensive tone of the subject of their message to me. (Given that they provided the script that they warned me about.) And they’ve taken my suggestion to pass word along to ALL of their customers that have the script in their account that they should find an alternative and get rid of cgiemail. The fact is cgiemail as a script has not been maintained in several years and there are other options out there. I encourage ANYONE using it to look into replacements.
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The connection between Spam and Viruses
After comparing MANY of these delivery failures (a fraction of what has gone out with my domain name forged I’m afraid…) They are all advertising essentially the same site (sometimes different gateways to it, but I’ve traced it all back to a close group of domains that have been unresponsive to abuse reports online…. (more…)