Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Virus, Trojans, and Malware Oh My


Remember Dorothy of the Wizard of the Oz!!!!!

According to one of the columnist at PC World, Viruses have been on the heavy this week. Apparently dozens of various emails have been sent out with virus infected attachments or links to a backdoor Trojan horse. The total peaked at close to 11 million messages per hour early Thursday, but remained at high volumes throughout the day Friday.

There are several different variants being sent out. One has a authentic looking link to CNN that is sure to cause havic on your pc if clicked, more information can be found here http://www.pcworld.com/article/149642/article.html

The second apparently is a email with a subject of a current news related headline to entice you into clicking on the link for more and then stating the adobe flash player is required to view the video clip of the story. The player is then stuck in a loop, only to cause more pop ups and infections when you click on cancel.

The third method is links to legitimate sites that had been compromised, meaning the hacker had infected real legitimate web sites with different variations so that the user could become infected by browsing the site. Officials had found over one thousand legitimate web sites that had become temples of doom for the consumer.

The fourth looks as though it was written by second graders stating that a federal express package has not been delivered and asked you to click on a trojan horse infected invoice to be printed.

The worst of the bunch is the adobe flash updater, which as mentioned above requires you to click on the link to update your flash player in order to watch the bogus news video.

It is said a unprotected computer will last about 10 seconds on the internet before becoming infected with some sort of virus, trojan or malware.

Infections such as these can often lead to identity theft, data loss and even hardware damage when the CPU is raised to 100%.

Ok commercial time......

If you live in the central Florida area, Computer Gal's located at 500 S. Main St, in downtown Brooksville can repair most virus related issues for just $40.00. All viruses, trojans, and mallware are removed and prevention is installed. I usually scan a computer for three days with several different products to ensure my customers are not re-infected after leaving my shop. We are now running a special for a complete pc tune up that includes the above and a complete pc check up, which includes updating all your drivers, and Microsoft updates for just $59.95 Here is the link/info to our shop, so please do yourself a favor and drop off your computer today.






500 S. Main St.

Brooksville, FL. 34601

(352) 505-2467


ok, now back to our regularly scheduled er huh article.

For more information on the current outbreak please check out PC World's link and bookmark our blog for the latest technology and security news and updates.
Until Later
Computer Gal

Friday, August 1, 2008

Think you have a virus? Scan online Free!

There are several companies that allow you to scan your computer for free, and remove any viruses found. These are great for second opinions, that is if you think your virus protection is not working correctly and especially if you don't have any at all. You can find a list of some free scanners on my web site under internet resouces and here is a few more.

http://www.bitdefender.com/


http://www.commandondemand.com/


https://www.webimmune.net/default.asp


http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/


http://www.pandasecurity.com/activescan/index/?track=1&Lang=en-US&IdPais=63


http://www.pcpitstop.com/default.asp

For those of you that are interested in more detail on viruses/worms and such, this is one of the most informative web sites I have ever found http://www.infosyssec.org/

So check them out. If you having trouble booting into windows to run one of the scans, boot to safe mode with networking, by pressing the F8 key repeatively when you fist turn on your computer. This will allow you to bypass alot of files and still be able to get on the internet to run a few scans.

Good Luck

Computer Gal