Viruses and Trojans and hacked mail accounts – Oh My!

We’ve seen an unually high amount of infections this month.  Here are some tips for keeping your computer free of virsues:

Keeping your system clean of viruses

 

.  Keep your antivirus (AV) software up to date and renew it at the end of its term.  AV Software renews every 1, 2 or 3 years.  Your AV product will tell you if it’s expiring – be sure to renew as this gives you the best possible protection.  Scan your system weekly for viruses or any time you feel at risk.  NO ANTI-VIRUS PROGRAM IS 100% EFFECTIVE AGAINST VIRUSES.  The only way to guarantee you don’t get viruses, is to stay off the internet.  Therefore, along with a good (paid for program – not a free one) AV Program you should follow the following safe internet practices.

.  Make sure your machine is up to date with all recommended Microsoft Updates.  Microsoft regularly puts out enhancements that help keep hackers off your system.  Check for updates at www.microsoft.com.  Click Security and Updates, then updates.  Allow Microsoft to check your machine for updates and install them at least once a month.  

.  Searching for anything free will bring up virus sites.  Examples Free Ring Tones, Free Music, Free Videos, Free Games, Free Gambling, Free Game codes (cracks) etc. 

.  Be extra cautious on High Risk Sites – Adult material, prescription drug sales, gambling sites and peer to peer sharing portals (music and video downloads from other computers – ‘free’ downloads) are all high risk sites. 

.  Do not click links in e-mails you are not expecting; even if they are from people you know.   Viruses can send e-mails from other infected machines or sites.

.  Change your passwords frequently and do not use the same password for all applications.  If your email is hacked, you don’t want the password to be the same as your bank account!

.  Call us quickly if you think you have a virus.  More damage is done by delayed removal or by downloading more viruses.  One Virus will allow others, including viruses that look like AV removal tools, or repair tools into your computer.  Before you pay money for a Trojan Virus – please call us!

3816 Oleander Drive

Wilmington, NC 28403 

 (910) 799-8585                                  

  www.YourComputerFriends.com

Filed under: Computer Software, DIY - Do It Yourself, computer viruses, virus, virus removal, viruses

“here you have”

Here you have … one heck of a mess.

An insidious e-mail virus remained in the top five Google searches Friday, a day after it snarled traffic and took down servers at ABC, NASA, Comcast, and Google — and possibly even swamped the Department of Homeland Security’s computers.

The Internet Storm Center, a free analysis and warning service that tracks malicious Internet activity, reported that the initial application that generated the vast cloud of spam clogging servers had been taken down, which should limit the spread of the virus Friday. And there were no new reports of infected servers Friday morning — but the Web may not be out of the woods just yet. 

“New variants may well follow,” the Storm Center warned.  

The virus, called “here you have” (or VBMania, though different security companies have different names for the same virus), is a simple Trojan Horse: An e-mail arrives in your inbox with the odd-but-suggestive subject line “here you have.” The body reads “This is The Document I told you about, you can find it Here” or “This is The Free Download Sex Movies, you can find it Here.”

Click the link in the message and you download and launch a program that spams the same Trojan Horse out to everyone in your address book, flooding and crippling e-mail servers.

Leading virus monitors such as McAfee Labs and Symantec are currently investigating the threat, and have already updated their website to push security products that could protect users. 

“Stop or remove the virus with Norton Internet Security 2011,” advises Symantec on the front page of its site Friday morning. The security companies describe “here you have” as especially challenging to monitor, since the virus may already have replicated into several new forms.

“It looks like multiple variants may be spreading and it may take some time to work through them all to paint a clearer picture,” warned Craig Schmugar on McAfee’s Threat Response page.

Difficult indeed.

In addition to a variety of major corporations, the virus appeared to take down internal servers at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Thursday. Numerous sources told FoxNews.com that some DHS agencies that run on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement server crashed and were mostly disabled throughout Thursday.

But U.S. officials denied that issues with its servers were related to the virus, telling FoxNews.com that “neither DHS nor ICE were agencies that were affected.”

“It’s a phishing attack — when you click on the link in an e-mail it goes into the address book. It was clogging a bunch of e-mail and that’s it,” officials told FoxNews.com. “It’s too early to say how sophisticated it was, but a number of companies and agencies were affected.”

DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said that Homeland Security’s experts were investigating the situation. She explained the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team — US-CERT, the agency tasked with preventing cyber attacks against the government — was actively sharing its expertise with departments and agencies that had been affected, as well as private companies.

“US-CERT has received multiple reports from a number of federal agencies and private sector entities experiencing an email worm. A full assessment is being conducted – US-CERT is in the process of collecting and analyzing samples of the malware and has developed and disseminated mitigation strategies.”

“Basic cyber security practices and hygiene are essential to maintaining the security of networks and individual computers,” Kudwa advised. She suggested that concerned Internet surfers should not trust unsolicited e-mail, treat all attachments with caution and (of course) never click links in unsolicited e-mails.

Hopefully , that advice makes its way back to NASA, where employees were hampered throughout the day — and took to Twitter to complain about the problem.

NASA’s Lunar Science Institute tweeted, “Houston, we have a problem… it’s called spam.”

SOURCE: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/09/09/beware-link-e-mail-virus-plays-havoc-internet/

Filed under: Computer Software, DIY - Do It Yourself, computer viruses, here you have it, virus, virus removal, viruses

McAfee update causes XP Problems!

Oops, they did it again.

At 6AM yesterday, McAfee released an update to its antivirus definitions for corporate customers that had a slight problem. And by “slight problem,” I mean the kind that renders a PC useless until tech support shows up to repair the damage manually.

McAfee’s “DAT” file version 5958 is causing widespread problems with Windows XP SP3. The affected systems will enter a reboot loop and [lose] all network access. We have individual reports of other versions of Windows being affected as well. However, only particular configurations of these versions appear affected. The bad DAT file may infect individual workstations as well as workstations connected to a domain. The use of “ePolicyOrchestrator”, which is used to update virus definitions across a network, appears to have [led] to a faster spread of the bad DAT file. The ePolicyOrchestrator is used to update “DAT” files throughout enterprises. It can not be used to undo this bad signature because affected system will lose network connectivity.

The problem is a false positive which identifies a regular Windows binary, “svchost.exe”, as “W32/Wecorl.a”, a virus.

Engadget’s Nilay Patel quotes a statement from McAfee downplaying the impact on consumers:

The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

That’s bad news for McAfee. Corporate customers are likely to tally up the one-day cost of fixing this damage (or multiple days, if Engadget’s report of tens of thousands of affected PCs within single companies is accurate), and they’re likely conclude that it’s time to find a new supplier of security software. At the very least, McAfee is going to have a lot of explaining to do at contract renewal time.

McAfee says it has already replaced the faulty virus definitions with an updated set, so if you update your definitions using the most recent set you will not encounter this issue. The company’s official recommendation for repairing the damage involves copying Svchost.exe from a working system and manually copying it to an affected system. The McAfee technical bulletin doesn’t include details about how to get to a command prompt on a system that’s been temporarily bricked. (Using an XP installation disk allows a tech support professional to boot to a recovery environment and copy the necessary files from a command prompt. The good folks at BleepingComputer.com have published a tutorial that explains the process. Third party recovery tools also provide access to the file system from command-line environments.) This sort of repair is not a job for end users, certainly, and generally requires a skilled support professional.

Now, it is hard to imagine picking a more crucial file to torpedo. Svchost.exe is one of the most crucial of all Windows system files. It hosts the services that make just about every OS function possible. As the symptoms described here suggest, Windows simply won’t start if Svchost.exe isn’t there.

The bigger question is how on earth an update like this ever made it out of the testing lab and onto a production server. This should have been caught at the very beginning of the testing process.

Unfortunately, though, this isn’t the first time McAfee has had a screw-up like this. Back in 2009, when the Conficker worm was making the rounds, I took a close look at how McAfee was handling its response to the new threat and was appalled at the sloppy, error-ridden documents they published for consumers and IT professionals

Source:  http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=2003&tag=nl.e019

Filed under: Computer Software, DIY - Do It Yourself, Small Business News, anti-virus problems, computer repair, mcafee, pc repair, virus removal, Your Computer Friends

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/

Filed under: Computer Software, steal money bank accounts, Trojan, viruses

Changing the Tax Amount in QuickBooks

To change the tax amount in QuickBooks click list, then item list then double click sales tax line & change as needed.

Filed under: Computer Software, News, change tax in QuickBooks, change tax rate in quickbooks

Purchasing a new computer

Considering replacing your computer? This is one of those times when replacing a computer becomes even more confusing than usual. That is because Microsoft is about to come out with another Operating System, or what my dad likes to call the ‘traffic cop of your computer”, the new Operating System, (OS) is called Windows 7. Vista, Microsoft’s current operating system, was not well received by many consumers and Windows 7 hopes to cure many of those issues. Beta testing of Windows 7 at our shop shows it to be much less resource intense then Vista but with that more modern Vista look and feel to it. For those consumers who want Windows 7, but need to buy a computer before the fall, Microsoft is offering free upgrades to Vista 7 with an installed purchase of Vista. So if you can’t wait to buy that new PC, don’t worry – you will still be able to upgrade to Windows 7, free of software charges, when it is released. Your Computer Friends works with customers to purchase new hardware as well as service existing hardware. If you are technology challenged, here is some plain English talk about deciding on the right computer for you: Hard Drive – Think of this as your computers filing cabinet. It is where all your programs and data are stored. The more programs you plan on installing, the more pictures and videos you plan on saving, the bigger your hard drive should be. This is a place where we normally recommend folks go larger for two reasons. First, we don’t know how much bigger programs will be in the future, or what future applications for your computer might be. Second, Hard Drives have come down in price significantly over the years and the price difference between a 250G Hard Drive and a 320G hard drive can be as little as 10.00. Why not go bigger when the future is somewhat unknown and the price point is so small? RAM – Random Access Memory – Think of this as your desktop. Not your computer desktop, but a real wooden type desktop. You take ‘stuff’ out of the file cabinet (Hard Drive) and put it on the desktop. If the desktop is too small, it will not function well. The more ‘stuff’ you use at once, the larger your RAM should be. ‘Stuff’ includes pictures, email, internet browsing, the operating system, your antivirus program etc. For a new computer, don’t go with anything less then 2G of RAM. Also know that your computer has RAM Slots, so more RAM in one slot will allow you more expansion at a lower price later on. For example, if the PC has 2 slots, for upgrade options, it is better to have 2G in one slot then 1 G in 2 slots. Higher end machines are typically built with equal RAM in each slot. But if upgrade is in your future, less RAM sticks is better. Processor – The processor moves the data from the Hard Drive (file cabinet) to the RAM (desktop). PCs now offer dual and quad core processors which are much faster then processors of only a couple of years ago. Dual core processors are the common solution for home and small business users. Think of this as two lanes of highway instead of one. It moves the data much faster. You will want a 2.0 GHz or better Dual Core Processor on that new PC. Need more help? We would be happy to assist with your new computer purchase, taking into account your particular needs. And yes, we can still get you Windows XP Computers – but time is running out.

Filed under: Computer Hardware, Computer Software, General PC information, Used Inventory, purchase new computer, Windows 7

Off Site Backup – Why we use a Data Recovery Company

The biggest hurdle in using an off-site backup system is getting the data back – HOW you want it, and WHEN you want it.  Otherwise, what is the point?  Your Computer Friends found this interesting article about two of the popular companies offering off-site backup and further illustrates why we DON’T use them!  Our off-site back up solution is provided by a vendor who does Data Recovery.  Who else is going to understand the need for Data HOW AND WHEN you need it!  Customer support is also top notch!  Call us if you need an off-site Data Encrypted backup plan for your Small Business. 

See full story:  Source Tech Republic.com

  http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/datacenter/?p=1186&tag=nl.e103

Filed under: Computer Software, DIY - Do It Yourself, computer backup, encryption, off site back up, off-site backup

Scramble Virus

YUCK this one is SUPER BAD. A RELOAD is probably in your future. Spreads via network, flash drive – ugly.

Filed under: Computer Software, Viruses, scramble, scramble virus, virut56

Bringing the Computer into the Living Room

Back in the day it used to be troublesome just to try and watch video on computers.  Now it is one of the most prominent uses for computers.

 

I am talking today about computer setup for living room use.  Some individuals know that a computer can be setup to display to external sources like televisions and projectors, but what they do not know is that it can be made into a media station.  Given the right parts and configuration you can watch TV on your computer or use your computer as a digital video recorder (DVR).

 

To watch TV you would need what is called a TV Tuner card.  It works in the way a cable box from you cable company would.  It receives the data and displays it on your monitor.  You can take it a step further and add a TV to the mix and now you can display your web browsing right on your television.

 

For Functionality you can get a wireless keyboard and mouse and sit back and peruse the web or do some work all while relaxing on your couch. You could even watch some home videos in the living room that you may have transferred to your computer.  Maybe you recorded some television programs using your TV Tuner card now you can bring them up and watch them at your leisure. 

 

Computers have come a long way and now there really are very little that computers can’t do.

Call us if you’d like to discuss your particular need!  910-799-8585

 

Filed under: Computer Hardware, Computer Software, DIY - Do It Yourself, pc as dvr, pc to tv, tv as computer monitor, tv on pc, tv over internet, tv pc, tv to pc, watch tv on computer, watch tv on your computer, Your Computer Friends

WWAY Films at Your Computer Friends !

We always enjoy a vist from our Friend Hailey Winslow, WWAY iDesk Reporter, News Channel 3.  Watch for us on the news April 1, 2009

WWAY Films at Your Computer Friends

Filed under: Computer Software, DIY - Do It Yourself, News, computer repair, conficker, How to remove viruses, laptop repair, virus removal, viruses, Your Computer Friends