Category: type

Careless Facebook profiling can lead to Identity Theft!

Paul

I just got in contact with a old friend from High school and another friend of mine suggest the new friend. I was looking at her profile and couldn’t believe what I saw:

Something users shouldn't do!!!As you can see this is not good I was amazed at how many people are giving out there birthdays and who they are married to to friends and family. So we heard about how people are claiming they need help or are in need of desperate money. This is nothing new, as you know people are having hard economy times and people are using the social engineering to scam people out of money.

I feel that I should warn people the important necessity.   You shouldn’t be broadcasting your DOB and who your married to to your friends, just in case they get hacked.

Recent activity indicates that identity thieves are hacking into trustworthy profiles before selling on the login details to interested parties. This information is used by spammers to target legitimate users, posting misleading links on their “walls” – personalized message boards.

[Via Computing.Co.UK]

This deservese a little mind and a lot of understanding.   By the spammers hacking into facebook accounts they have the chance to scam or spam people with links to possibly have a virus or trojan installer.

[ad#ad2-right]For example This one blog talks about the Virus:

Symantec’s Norton Antivirus software has flagged this as a “high risk” Infostealer.Gampass virus. More info on this particular Trojan vius is here. (Note: Symantec warns the risk level is “low,” since it originated in 2006, but this new Facebook email is a new iteration of the same virus.)

You might be inclined to click on this link because it’s from a friend, but they did not intentionally send it to you — and yes, their Facebook photo is attached, too.

[Via Sync-blog]

facebookident2Now I went searching through my friends list and also found this little bit of information.  As you can see this one is asking for people to use there account to scam people out of money.  They could use this to find out even more information of the Other partner and make you believe your talking to the real deal.   Saying they need money because they are stuck over seas or something like that.   I’ve seen this on other blogs where people have sent money to “friends” but are actually people who are the scammers.  Then if you send the money you are out of luck with your money and possibly your friends to.  I am sure there are more but this is prime examples of what you shouldn’t do and why.

So what can you do to prevent Identity Theft and/or being scammed?

    [ad#cricket-right-ez]

  • Roboform Review — A Password Manager that will help protect your passwords from key loggers and other such phishing sites.    I strongly recommend it to to all who are security minded. (Never use the same password for all your accounts)

  • Are you worried about your identity? — This is good information in checking out sites that might be questionable.  You can find out what type of site it by using your brains.

  • Old Phish Become New again — This is blog post about twitter and what may happen if you did give out your password.   This is a good example of why you never should give out your password to third party websites.

  • Twitter Spammers a getting more smarter — This is also good example of what happens when you see become friends with someone who isn’t real.   You could be the next to be spammed and/or impersonated.

If you follow some common steps you to could prevent from being the victim or getting your Identitiy stolen.   Some things to remember is Never tell anyone your Birthday the whole date like someone did on twitter a few days ago.  It’s nice that they are growing older but that gives people that much more information to use to steal your money or your idenitiy.   Think before you give out any personal information like Age, Married, who your married to and anything that might be used to be able to access your account or your impersonate you.  Remember only you can prevent from being scammed or lossing your identity, you wouldn’t want to have to pay for your mistakes.

Disaster preparation 101 — Data backup

Paul

In this one I will talk about Disaster, it happens to all of us from time to time. A fire, a earthquake, a stolen laptop or any number of ways. So what happens to your data, is it stored on the laptop? Is it important very sensitive data? Could you get fired if you lost that data?

[ad#ad2-right]These are all questions you must ask yourself when you have laptop. How do you backup your data or even do you have a backup? Having seen this with my own clients, I must wonder if there are people out there who just don’t care. I had a client the other day who gotten a virus and this was a really mean virus. Deleted some very important files when you tried to clean the virus out. She called me in a panic because she couldn’t load up windows? I asked if she had any backups, she said “what’s a backup” . So I sat there discussing this with the client for over 20 minutes. Finally she started to understand, she said she had the OEM Backup DVD but nothing else. She also said she needed help with getting data off the computer. I told her that I would be able to come the next day and I was lucky the virus didn’t do anything else to her data. We were able to retrieve the data from her system. That is where I start my rant , Why would anyone not have backup of there most important data?

So How do you backup your data? This is controversial and somewhat depends on how much people want to spend to keep there data safe and not loose pictures or music. There are several ways to do it, each way has it’s pitfalls or short comings and requires a little more effort:

Kinds of Backup

Hard Medium – DVD, CD, External Hard drive

Although,  The hard medium is usually used that doesn’t mean you can have a backup other than hard.   Here are some ways to back up on the internet.

Internet Medium:

  • Jungle Disk — Provides online storage through the Amazon s3 service.   Only pay for what you use.   It works well with most Operating system.  I’ve used it on Vista so it is really nice.

  • Carbonite Online backup –Another good Online storage.

  • Some Other Online backup — Here a list from Amazon to better help you find the type of software that you might need.

These are just a few options, if you want to look for other you can.  The important thing to do is BACKUP because if you need some data that gets wiped or destroyed.  You will be kicking yourself for not backing up.

Figuring out the Email-Worm Win32.Zafi.b

Paul

This is another just I just saw on the web and wanted to talk about what this little Worm does and what it’s known Aliases:

Email-Worm.Win32.Zafi.b (Kaspersky Lab) is also known as: I-Worm.Zafi.b (Kaspersky Lab), W32/Zafi.b@MM (McAfee), W32.Erkez.B@mm (Symantec), Win32.Hazafi.30720 (Doctor Web), W32/Zafi-B (Sophos), Win32/Zafi.B@mm (RAV), PE_ZAFI.B (Trend Micro), Worm/Zafi.B (H+BEDV), W32/Zafi.B@mm (FRISK), Win32:Zafi-B (ALWIL), I-Worm/Zafi.B (Grisoft), Win32.Zafi.B@mm (SOFTWIN), Worm.Zafi.B (ClamAV), W32/Zafi.B.worm (Panda), Win32/Zafi.B (Eset)

[ad#ad2-left]This worm spreads via the Internet as an attachment to infected messages, and also via local and file-sharing networks.
It is written in Assembler, and packed using FSG. It is 12800 bytes in packed form, and 33292 in unpacked form.

This Worm seems to be running through email and file sharing sites, One thing it tries to do is stop the process and deletes:
fvprotect.exe
winlogon.exe
jammer2nd.exe
services.exe

It attempts to detect antivirus program files on the computer and overwrite them with a copy of itself.

[ad#ad2-right]It also attempts to conduct DoS attacks on the following sites:

www.2f.hu
www.parlament.hu
www.virusbuster.hu
www.virushirado.hu

This seems to be a very big virus and can be removed with the use of Kapersky Virus removal tool for free for this type of virus. In order to prevent this virus in the future the user has to remember about not getting opening unknown documents or emails and not running any unkown program from an unknown file sharing.   Also remember you need to have an anti-virus  and also a firewall to protect yourself in the future.

Facebook : Beware Spam for breakfast. (Virus)

Paul

In today’s society, we’ve been to complacent with people with people clicking links for the social group. In one such article on Channel Web, a nice little blog, says this:

[ad#ad2-right]

The worm was discovered by IT security provider Kaspersky Lab, which said the threat, Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, is targeting Facebook users by creating spam messages and sending them to the infected user’s friends via the site.

“Unfortunately, users are very trusting of messages left by ‘friends’ on social networking sites,” said Alexander Gostev, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab, in a statement. “So, the likelihood of a user clicking on a link like this is very high.”


[Via Channel Web]

This seems to be a problem people thinking that a link someone sends them is a real good link but actually is a link to a video site. According to this article the links people are sending are actually a fake video link, telling you have to download some update to flash player, by downloading this program. The user gets involved with the virus and the fun begins. So how can you prevent this from happening, two ways one is a very good group of software to make sure you have the latest and greatest video codecs. That too can be something they’ll say you need and if you’ve already installed this list of codecs then you know they’ll not telling the truth and you can quickly get away from the site laughing.

[ad#ad2-left]What’s this program name, it is call the K-lite Mega Codec pack. In this Pack you will be able to play almost everything without having to go download another program. This is done by people who want you to have all the latest codecs installed so you don’t have to go by a program you’ll only going to use once a month.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll no longer have to worry for the most part about codecs. There will be times when you might have to visit that site and update them but that will be far less.

The other thing you must remember is if it says you must update your player. That should be a sign that there is something. I’ll always go to the site and check for example Adobe. If it says I need to update my flash I’ll manually type it into my browser. This way you will know you have the latest updates, if you need to update the flash player by all means go to here and update.

If you got the virus I’d check out my Anti-virus and Anti-Spyware page and that should show you will you need to get rid of the Virus. This virus is very easy to get rid of, just download any one of the anti-virus software and install it. Don’t forget to update the virus database while your at it. That should fix the problem pretty fast. Remember the only way to prevent from getting the virus is YOU.

Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A is not a Firefox plugin.

Paul

A new type of malware designed to harvest web passwords has been detected in-the-wild by BitDefender’s antivirus research labs. This latest e-threat – called Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A – is intended to be delivered onto a compromised computer system by other malware for subsequent download into Mozilla Firefox’s Plugin folder. Once installed it gets to work every time Firefox is started.

[Via Bitdefender]

[ad#ad2-right]So having seen this I thought I’d come up with ways around this to better protect yourself.  One way to prevent this from getting your sensitive data is to get a program like Sandboxie.   You could stop using Firefox that would be silly, because right now Firefox is more secure than Chrome and Internet Explorer.   I’d also suggest checking out my Anti-spyware page and Anti-Virus page and get some more protection.

The key to this virus protection is just be cautious of where you go and keep all you system update to date to prevent all this from happening.  It is also advisable to not have your passwords saved on Firefox, you should use something like Roboform, it is free  to download and try.  It will encrypt your passwords so if they don’t know the master password then they are out of luck.  Roboform is also good for coming up with some strong passwords.  Just some suggestions to prevent from people seeing your sensitive data, you don’t want anyone to get that data.