All Posts by Paul

A Sneak Peak at the A600 3G Broadband Cricket Card

Paul

So I was doing a little research and found this nugget from my Affiliates Network:

Features:

Removable Memory Format:  microSD
Storage Capacity External memory up to 4GB
Text Messaging Yes
Contact Directory Yes
Language English/Spanish

Wireless Capabilities:

Technology CDMA
Mode Tri-Band
Data Transfer Speed 3G (EVDO Rev 0, Rev A) and 1x
USB Broadband Modem (A600) Looks interesting, and I am thinking this will be the next thing the company will start Advertising for. Right now though, it cost 119$ with a 50$ Mail in Rebate and you spend 69$. With a CDMA only USB Card like the UM100, you know the speed of that. Now According to Wikipedia for 3G and I’ll quote:

Thus users sold 3G service may not be able to point to a standard and say that the speeds it specifies are not being met. While stating in commentary that “it is expected that IMT-2000 will provide higher transmission rates: a minimum speed of 2Mbit/s and maximum of 14.4Mbit/s for stationary users, and 348 kbit/s in a moving vehicle,”

Now this is a much improved speed and I will be testing this in the future but for right now it is untested. I’ll have another article in the coming months about this. I also like the look of this but haven’t seen it first hand. The other thing I like is the the 4 Gigabytes of MicroSD memory. [intlink id=”3171″ type=”post”]I can see a whole range of useful programs you can install on the USB and make it Portable to a point[/intlink]. I’ll improve on that later on once I play around with what you can have on the card and what you have to have to use the USB modem. The Modem supports Windows 2000 through Windows Vista 64 Bit, also Supports Macintosh.

More to Come!!  (Check out the UM100 Review)

[ad#text-broadband1]

Rogue Fake Codecs on the Rise

Paul

Panda Labs has been talking about Adware/VideoPlay and they are seeing a lot of variants on this.   They even play a game, find the difference in the installation screen:

Now as you can see this look to be the same agreement in all those difference installation.  Some things to consider Never install any software from a website that you don’t know Nothing about about.

Panda Labs also talks about these new variants in regards to what they do:

This file spreads by making copies of itself in the removable drives and it also creates an autorun.inf in order to be run when they are accessed. This file collects the data stored in the browsers, such as cookies, passwords, profiles, email accounts, etc, and connects to a remote address to send the information.
[Via Panda Labs Blog]

[ad#ad2-right]As you can see this makes you have very little security with your system.  I talk about Identity theft, and why you should always worry about your identity.   This however will make your passwords less secure and maybe even compromise you system to the point of having a data breach.   You need to be careful when you come by this, some fake codecs have been know to be scareware.  In which, the fake codecs installs a Trojan to tell you have a virus and try to make you buy a fake program to get rid of the Virus.  In one of my recent posts about Codecs and Facebook, I talked about the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack and how that will prevent you from installing these sociable links from friends and family.  The nice thing about this pack is it install all the really good codecs that you might come across on the web.  If you have this installed and there’s a website that says you need a special codec, you’d know that it is either a fake codec or the author who made the video doesn’t standardize.   In which case you will be more willing to leave that site without installing that codec.

If you follow these steps and also consider installing an Anti-virus and Firewall, you will be in a much better shape then when you first started out. Remember only you can prevent from getting a virus. You should also consider doing the registry edit that will prevent Autorun. As you can tell these new variants also are spread through USB and other removable media. This is the other way these programs are using to infect other systems.

Time to update Adobe Flash Player 10.0.22.87

Paul

Adobe has issued a patch for some of the exploits in the wild. This should be installed on any system that isn’t up to the date with Adobe’s player. If you want to check your systems version you can go here and it will tell you what your version is and what the current version is.

If it doesn’t look like this:

adobe1002287

[ad#ad2-right]Then your on the wrong website.   According to Adobe this fixes CVE-2009-0519, CVE-2009-0520, CVE-2009-0522, CVE-2009-0114, CVE-2009-0521.

This update resolves a buffer overflow issue that could potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2009-0520)

This update resolves an input validation issue that leads to a Denial of Service (DoS); arbitrary code execution has not been demonstrated, but may be possible. (CVE-2009-0519)

An update to the Flash Player settings manager display page on Adobe.com has been deployed to avoid a potential Clickjacking issue variant for Flash Player. The Settings Manager is a special control panel that runs on your local computer but is displayed within and accessed from the Adobe website. (CVE-2009-0114)

This update resolves a Windows-only issue with mouse pointer display that could potentially contribute to a Clickjacking attack. (CVE-2009-0522)

This update prevents a potential Linux-only information disclosure issue in the Flash Player binary that could lead to privilege escalation. (CVE-2009-0521)

[Via Adobe Website]

Although this is due to the problem with the exploits in the Windows environment, this however won’t stop virus writers from using this exploit for the Macintosh and Linux Distro’s.  This should be updated on there system also.

Microsoft Updates the Autorun Patch KB967715

Paul

The updates offered in this article correctly disable the Autorun features. These features were not correctly disabled if you followed previously published guidance. The updates that are offered in this article have been distributed to the following systems through the Windows Update and Automatic update distribution channels:

* Microsoft Windows 2000
* Windows XP Service Pack 2
* Windows XP Service Pack 3
* Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1
* Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2

[ad#ad2-right]This will help with the Conflicker Worm, also known the new variant Conflicker B++. Microsoft released this patch to better help the Administrators deal with the problem at hand. That the Conflicker worm exploits the autorun feature in most system. The Administrators need to disable the Autorun feature the right way, or it will not prevent infections.

Microsoft releases the necessary registry keys to edit and how want updates are needed to make this work. This will make it much harder for any program to exploit the Autorun feature in Windows.

This information is provided to help the Admins prevent from getting infected and should not be done by anyone who isn’t comfortable with editing the registry. If you’re not sure how to do it, please take it to someone who can do it. You could potentially make the system unstable messing with registry.

TINYURL being used by scammers and hackers — How to prevent it!!

Paul

With Phishing attempts going on with the TINYURL redirect website, I thought I would show you how you could prevent from going to a site you don’t want. Tinyurl.com has a great little feature, although it is a feature based on your cookies. It however will help prevent you from going to a site that you don’t know anything that about. It’s called the Preview Feature, and is available to any user who wants to use it.

previewtiny

As you can see if you enable it and you go to a click on a tinyurl, you will see this:

http://tinyurl.com/6t7ukk

previewtiny1

[ad#ad2-right]As you can see, if you click any TINYURL links you will automatically be told where that link is redirecting you to. This however only works with there being a cookie left behind in your system to let tell Tinyurl that is has to show the link first. So if you clean your cookies out from time to time, you will need to enable it every time after you clean the browser cookies. This will help prevent you from being phished because you will be able to tell if it is the right site in the first place. If not then you don’t have to visit that site. This should be enabled on all Short URL Sites, I hope they make it a mandatory for any site that redirects. This would help stop phishing and scammers because they can’t hide behind unknown url. Only time will tell though, these sites are always going to have problems but this would solve so many problems.