Antivirus Pro 2010 is another rogue security application that installs itself by ways of security vulnerabilities. This particular one seems to be installed by the braviax(cru629) family of trojans. It’s related to PC Antispyware 2010, PC Security 2009, and Home Antivirus 2010. It essentially claims that your pc is unprotected and makes false claims about infected files. Pleas do not send any money to the makers of these pests.
Tag: remove
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Finallyfast.com Removal | Ascentive PC Speed Scan Pro
Oh I cringe at those commercials. You know the ones I’m talking about where everyone is whining about how slow their pc is. Wah…. “Mom this game is so slow.” I just LOVE how they mention that their parent company ascentive has been featured in several major publications. (Osama Bin Laden has been featured in many publications too, that isn’t exactly an endorsement.) Well, last night I thought I’d go and look and see what people were saying about this magical mystical piece of software and I wasn’t really surprised to find them being roasted right and left.
McAfee Site Advisor has apparently recently moved the site from the bad guy to the good guy column and is catching all sorts of heat from visitors for that. Many claim that there are browser exploits being served up from their pages. It was on Spyware Warriors list of rogue applications although it has been removed. (Users may note that the removal from the list isn’t equal to an endorsement either.)
The kicker…
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Linux software raid notes
Here are a few other notes on linux software raid. I created a directory called raidinfo to keep information in to make it easy to maintain the raid array. First… from the software raid howto, I’ve done the following….
sfdisk -d /dev/hda > /raidinfo/partitions.hda
sfdisk -d /dev/hde > /raidinfo/partitions.hdeSo…. I’ve now got a good snapshot of the partitioning data. When I hooked up an external usb drive to add to the array, all I needed to do is this…
sfdisk /dev/sda < /raidinfo/partitions.hda (more…)
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Windows XP lost administrators password
Some time ago, I’ve talked about chntpasswd as a great utility for when you’re locked out of a Windows 2000 or XP installation because you’ve either forgotten (or weren’t informed) of the valid password to get in. It turns out there is a different approach… well yes, you could format and install from scratch blowing away all data on the drive, OR you could do a second installation in the same partition – that could be messy though and waste space. If you just need a few files off, you could boot up a linux livecd and copy the files to another disc before wiping and rebuilding, but there is yet another possibility….
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Collection company….
I’m quite frustrated this evening. Another long day of computer problems and tonight I come in to around the tenth call from a collection agency. The kicker in this case is that it’s not for me, but for someone I’ve never heard of. Over the years we’ve had a fair amount of credit card debt and have worked our way to within about one payment of being out from under. All with no defaults, no collection agencies, etc. We’ve followed the rules in other words. And the last 2 weeks we’ve been harrassed by a collection agency looking for someone that we’ve never met that I can only assume gave our phone number. The collection agency is….
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Remote Tech Support with x11vnc and wrapper script
So, the idea is that I wanted something “like” the Ultranvnc Single Click download, only for linux. The main idea being is that if someone is looking for a bit of desktop tech support on linux, we don’t need to be giving instructions for 5 different package managers, or source compilation, or anything more than MAYBE something to cut and paste. In fact, something like this…. wget http://www.mysite.com/remote-support && sh remote-support could be easily pasted into a console window (which hopefully we can give instructions on finding), or a run command in kde for instance. Then the remote-support script should do the rest. *(By the way, the script doesn’t have to be chmod’ed to executable when we use sh to invoke it…)
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Warner Bros and 180solutions….
I think somewhere along the line, Warner Bros missed the memo that 180solutions is not a brand that many people would jump to associate with. Apparently 180Solutions has started making two Warner Bros shows (a soap opera and animated series) available for download on some of their sites including zango. Of course, the episodes come with bundled adware downloads which, I’m sure, “enhance your web browsing experience” by popping up relevant ad windows on your desktop.
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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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/bash/rm: argument list too long
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this complaint from the bash shell when trying to remove a bunch of files. In this case, I was trying to clear a directory where log rotating had run amuck and there was a 10 second lag in typing
ls ∗.gzand seeing any output…. So, I did rm ∗.gz and got bash/rm: argument list too long in response…. So, then I though I could “surgically remove” some files and shrink the list a bit…rm ∗5∗3∗2∗.gz -f; rm ∗5∗3∗1∗.gz -f,etc, etc, etc after about 4 of these it became obvious I’d need to find another way because even some of THOSE gave the “argument list too long” error. (What’s more, it looked like I was going to have to deal with files matching∗[1-5]∗[0-9]∗[0-9]∗gz– yuck…) -
How to escape from the deluge of credit card offers…..
This isn’t necessarily tech related, but modern life related I guess. I can’t count how many credit card offers we receive in the mail each month. I have visions of a few acres of forest land somewhere being tagged with our name and the subtitle… “credit card offers”. I’ve never followed up on an unsolicited card offer that I recall and as I was tearing one up recently, I noticed a little not at the bottom….
“You can choose to stop receiving “prescreened” offers of credit from us and other companies by calling toll-free 1.888.5.OPT.OUT. For more information about prescreened offers, please see the PRESCREEN & OPT-OUT NOTICES in the Terms and Conditions section of this offer.”