BUY LOCAL!
Your Computer Friends attended the kick off meeting of the Buy Local campaign on Wednesday, October 28, 2009. 70 cents of every dollar spent at a local business stays locally, unlike money spent with National Chain stores. Since all that money stays local, it helps keep our local economy healthy and stable in these tough economic times. For more about the Buy Local initiative see this article by Judy Royal of the Star News:
Acer Recall – Aspire Notebooks may overheat.
Acer has voluntarily recalled certain models of their Aspire series. Affected units are models AS3410, AS3810T, AS3810TG, AS3910TZ and AS3810TZG. In the affected units the microphone cable may overheat when extreme pressure is applied repeatedly to the left palm rest. The case may melt and the unit may malfunciton.
See the attached link to contact Acer about your product:
http://customercare.acer-euro.com/customercare/AcerUpdate.aspx?CID=SG&LID=ENG&IType=JM31
Laptop Skins are in! Check this out!
I've got my eye on you!
Give your Laptop an Original Look that is all YOU! Stop by and check out the available designs. Only $10.00. Makes a great gift idea!
Trojan steals money from Bank Accounts
Your Computer Friends found this interesting article we wanted to share:
Bank Botnet Serves Fake Info to Thwart Researchers
- By Kim Zetter
- October 6, 2009 |
- 12:49 am |
- Categories: Hacks and Cracks
Researchers tracking a gang of online bank thieves found that the criminals have deployed a devious means to thwart law enforcement and anyone else trying to monitor their activities.
The gang behind the URLZone trojan, which siphons money from online bank accounts and then alters a victim’s online bank statement to hide the fraud, have also devised a method to hide the accounts of mules they use to launder the siphoned funds.
Researchers at RSA’s FraudAction Research Labs say the gang was aware that their malware was being tracked by investigators, so they programmed their command and control server to generate non-mule accounts to make it more difficult for law enforcement and fraud investigators to halt laundering through the real accounts.
The URLZone is a Trojan that has been targeting customers of several top German banks. The victims’ computers are infected with the Trojan after visiting compromised legitimate web sites or rogue sites set up by the hackers.
Once a victim is infected, the malware detects when a user is logged into a bank account, then contacts a control center hosted on a machine in Ukraine to initiate a money transfer from the victim’s account, without the victim’s knowledge. The control center tells the Trojan how much money to wire transfer from the victim’s online bank account and which mule account should receive the transfer.
The money gets transferred to the legitimate bank accounts of unsuspecting money mules who’ve been recruited online for work-at-home gigs, never suspecting that the money they’re allowing to flow through their account is being laundered. The mules then transfer the money to the thieves’ chosen account.
Researchers, hoping to extract a list of mule accounts from the command and control center, infected honeypot computers with the URLZone Trojan. But when the computers contacted the command and control center to collect a mule account, the command center fed them “fake” accounts.
The fraudsters developed a series of tests to check infected computers to determine if they’re “legitimate” URLZone-infected machines. For example, every infected computer is assigned a unique identification code by the Trojan. If the ID is not a valid Trojan ID known by the server, the fake computer gets fed one of 400 non-mule accounts. The non-mule accounts are legitimate bank accounts, just not ones the criminals are using to launder money.
“Interestingly, when generating a non-mule account in order to dupe anti-fraud security researchers,” RSA researchers write on their blog, “the Trojan does not display random names and account numbers. Instead, it displays real bank account details that were previously entered by URLZone victims as the payees of legitimate transactions.”
The RSA researchers call this the “most unique attribute” of the botnet, which “speaks to its operators’ caution against having their criminal pipelines compromised.”
Source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/urlzone-trojan/
Registry Cleaners – save your money
At first I thought it will speed up my computer after reading their website. Then I paid and registered. Instead it slowered my computer and I can’t connect to the internet either.
Their customer support is the worest I had even seen. They said it is not their fault, and asked me to download and install again and again. But nothing changed.
For about the same amount of money, we can repair your registry in a way that really makes it better.
How to pick a good computer repair company.
Your Computer Friends saw this article and agree with many of the things in it. We have been in business almost 4 years and have an excellent reputation – and, we take credit cards. Check out the article and our online testimonials.
Welcome
Your Computer Friends is located at:
3816 Oleander Drive
Wilmington, NC 28403
Monday – Friday 9-6 Saturday 10 – 2
Mac & PC Repair On-site, Remote Support & Drop off Services available.
2 Blocks from the Independence Mall at 39th Street
We fix all major brands of desktops and laptops & servers. We offer new sales solutions and off-site encrypted backup services along with all levels of data recovery.
Locally owned and operated.
