Computer Tips -Tech Info

There is a new rogue among us. It appears that Alpha Antivirus has replaced Personal Antivirus as one of the latest rogue security programs. This particular rogue installs through online “scans” (popups.) The reason I say “scans” is they’re essentially animations of a scan (every one that visits the site will see the same thing […]

The clampi virus is in the news in a couple places today. Surprisingly it’s in Symantec’s virus database since January and rated as a low risk. However, the sole purpose of this trojan is to monitor your Windows based computer for connections to more than 4500 different financial related sites and log any usernames and […]

A lot of people seem to be reporting today that AVG is finding files to be infected with trojan horse proxy.ahiy or trojan horse proxy ahiy. From what I’ve seen, although that may be a valid virus designation from AVG, they are also reporting many legitimate files as this trojan proxy ahiy. AVG is acknowledging […]

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 […]

These stories come up from time to time. A free giveaway of some sort and it turns out that there’s spyware or a virus embedded, company gives a big “whoops” and fixes things by replacing them…. McDonalds had a promotion going where up to 10,000 people could win a flash based mp3 player they also […]

Betanews is reporting that Samsung’s site has been hacked and is currently serving up malware in some areas. user intervention is required for it to run on the users pc, but be cautious. Samsung has been notified, but as of Friday morning (according to the report) the trojan horse is still there. I really wonder […]

I’m having to make sure I put the date in the title of these posts now…. over the weekend there were rumors of a new powerpoint vulnerability. Sans had an early notice of some trojan droppers using powerpoint files. And by the 20th (Sunday) it was being called a 0-day. There is a good FAQ […]

Well, let’s start with the extensions first. Like ANY software, you should be cautious installing something from an untrusted source. If you think an extension looks neat and cool – look for reviews and third party information before installing it. That much said…. never install an extension that comes attached as an unexpected email…. Apparently, […]

Sometimes you just want to cry… This writeup is an example of the “soft underbelly” of every network’s security plan… the users. Basically, you have a group that was hired to do a computer security audit of a credit union. They were told that some of the main concerns were social engineering (easy sharing of […]

Incidents.org had an entry in the last couple days on a malware infestation that was interesting and showed a couple things. 1) You can’t bet on antivirus to keep you safe (the initial installer was not detected by most AV vendors – suspicious by 1.) (If you think about it, this makes perfect sense – […]