Computer Tips -Tech Info

Thank you Brian Krebs of the Security Fix. He has just made the internet a little better place. He’s worked for several months investigating a group that is believed to have been hosting provider for up to 75% of the Internet’s junk email as well as child porn websites, rogue anti-virus software and who knows […]

Wow… just took a glance at the error_logs and saw numerous errors from Trackbacks and started browsing to find that the last few days we’ve been weathering a spam storm. Thanks to akismet and another tool I’ve only had maybe 2 comments stuck in moderation that were spammy, but several thousand have made it to […]

For a few months now (since the demise of bluefrog actually) I’ve noticed that the level of junk mail has gone up on my own mail server. Yes, I use spamassassin to filter and tag, but the volume of stuff that’s tagged has gone up (as well as the volume that slips through.) I’ve had […]

It’s really good to see one chalked up against a botnet operator. Friday, a former botnet operator was sentenced to 37 months in prison for breaking into 100’s of thousands of computers. There NEED to be more stories like this. Unfortunately though, with a possible benefit of making $6,000-10,000 per month being a botnet herder…. […]

MS06-040 is one of last weeks Windows updates and is the one that was probably the biggest target for “wormable” activity. There’s a good deal of news from over the weekend with regards to this. First: Snort signatures, the MS06-040 exploit was spotted actively “in the wild”, and of course, our perennial friends in the […]

Sans has a story on botnet traffic spotted coming from the TOR network. Now, I had to refresh my memory on what TOR is, but it’s an anonymizing network, essentially a computer running TOR, would collect a list of TOR client machines on the internet and then connections to other pcs are routed through encrypted […]

It went un-noticed by most people for a few years. After all, the ones that were affected were just those that were “asking for it”. Where to start. Let’s see, back in the day there were some that sent out messages to other peoples computers and even when people tried to stop getting the messages […]

A few days ago – while musing about the botnet take-down of Blue Security – I said something along the lines of “Make sure your pc’s are clean from “bugs” and help your friends do likewise. Spread the word, we need a “worldwide clean your computer with antivirus and antispyware day” or something like it. […]

There is a new twist on the bot networks that have been the plague of computing in recent years. This one is called ClickBot. The story is from Incidents.org Many sites, (like this one) use adsense to “monetize their content”. The idea is that advertisers bid on “clicks”. So, if I wanted to advertise on […]