Category: Wiki

ThePirateBay might be blocked in the US

Paul

I was looking around on Google and thought I just for giggles check out the Piratebay complaints. I tried going to the site and here’s what Popups:

notauthorized

[ad#ad2-right]I tried on OpenVPN and my Local ISP, It keeps saying that. I then tried on my Cricket Modem and it tells me the connection has been interrupted, like something stops the connection in the first place. I can ping it and I can Tracert the Site but I can’t even view it. I would like to know if Anyone else is having this problem also. Although I’ve not checked Thepiratebay.org complaints for quite some time because I’ve been so busy with my website. If you want to watch your favorite shows check out these sites like Hulu, CBS, NBC, ABC, ABC FAMILY and TNT.TV for free. I am just curious as to what happened and does this have anything to do with Net Neutrality?   Anyway I wanted to talk about this and see what people are saying.  Anyone know what is going on?  Let’s talk about this and help everyone by saying what you know.   I don’t know if Thepiratebay.org is down but I do wonder if someone is preventing people from getting to the website.   I’ll update when I have more information.

Are you worried about your identity?

Paul

So after the fiasco of the other day, I decided I will talk about security and why you should worry about new websites that you have never heard of.   People are not worrying about there identity and keeping there identity safe.   You see whenever someone signs up to a service without thinking about their password being stored or even used maliciously.   You see when most people don’t use more than one or two passwords for all there accounts and then you use the same password with a new website.  Are you asking for your identity to be stolen?  In one of my previous blog posts I talked about not having any privacy on the internet.

So How can you protect your privacy?

When ever I come across a site that I don’t know about and I want to protect my account from being compromised I find out what I can from several places:

  1. [ad#ad2-right]Google — Yes this is quite common to use to find out about what people are saying asking the keywords like is it a scam or what people are saying about the site?  This can be very useful to make sure I don’t get scammed by a company for instants the Nationwide marketing scam.  Although this is really important when you get things that sound questionable.  This can be very useful with regards to keep your wallet safe.

  2. Whois Network — If there is a site you’ve not heard about and have a question about it you can always do a whois lookup.   This is a great resource for finding out how long the site has been up and who owns it?  The problem with this is most people who have a website aren’t worried about security and privacy.   So you make sure this site isn’t a phish site or to make sure the site isn’t being used improperly.

  3. Sitetiki —  a good site to do some research.   It’s a wiki like Wikipedia but for websites and if they are good or bad.  It also has a spammer list for people to watch and make sure not to go to.  These sites are usually redirect spam sites uses for email.

What about Personal privacy?

With this I also want to talk about security online to prevent people from gaining access to your accounts online by guessing the password.  Some sites also like to phish for your account information and use the information gained to take control over your account so here are some useful links to help protect your account information:

  • [ad#cricket-right-ez]Roboform — This is good for generating a really good random password and remembering it.  This will keep people from guessing the password and also make it easy to come up with another good password.  This will also fill out the required site forms that usually use to sign into website.

  • A good VPN Service —  If your like me and you have to use free wifi from time to time and want to make sure you have privacy on the net.  This is good for security on any open wifi network and you don’t want to have anyone watch you while your browse online.  In case someone is interested what VPN’s are used for here is the link to let people understand it better.

  • Perfect Paper Passwords — This is coming from Security now Episode 115 and he talks about this to better help people make the best possible passwords.  Listen to it and it will help you understand more about security.

These are just a few ways to prevent people from gaining access to an account.   After doing some research on this and thinking about this in bigger detail.   I would like to make a public apologies about the fiasco yesterday and what happened.  In all truthfulness everything didn’t seem right with the doings of the going on with website.   I also was worried about the twitter spam it was sending out as you started the service.   I didn’t know until later that it was a real person trying to make a product twitter users could really use.   I have learned from my experience and I will work harder next time and not be so quick to act next time.   If I was the company that bought that site, I’d also offer a job to both of them for being intuitiveness on coming up with a really good product.

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.

Tools for Virus Removal : The ones I like to use!

Paul

In this post I want to talk about virus removal tools that I like to use when I need to remove a virus.   Some thing to consider when using these tools are:

Each of these have to be dealt with differently because each requires something different.  Like rootkits if you have one installed and know that it is a rootkit you only options are to download some rootkit removers like:

  • Sopho’s Anti-rootkit remover —  This is good for those more known viruses and can remove several types of rootkits.   This isn’t the only one I use, but it is a part of group that does the rootkit removing for me.

  • Microsoft Rootkit Revealer —  This is good for proving there is a rootkit.  I’ve not seen it not detect a rootkit.  Most of the time when I find a rootkit from the other rootkit revealers this one actually dos better with information.

  • Panda Anti-Rootkit Remover — This one is another one I use when the other ones can’t remove it.  Each one does remove certain rootkit differently and works better than the other.

  • Aries Rootkit Remover from Lavasoft — This is good for those really tough rootkits but have some great benefits for removing some of the really tough rootkits.

These are the ones that work well with me when it comes to removing the rootkits.  I’ve not had one of these to remove a rootkit but that depends on how you deal with the virus in the first place.  Now for Anti-spyware and Anti-Virus software here are some of the tools that I suggest:

  • Hijackthis — Run it, and when you get the LOG file you will want to go to HijackThis Log Analysis Site 1 and HijackThis Log Analysis Site 2, and see what it says.  This is the best software because it will scan all of the registry and tells you like a wiki what might it be.

  • MSCONFIG — Sometimes it is hidden but if you check through the MSCONFIG for any files that might not need to load. Also check the services tab and see if there is any services that may not be needed.

  • Pctools Antivirus Free Software — This is a free software so what can I say.

  • AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 7.5.503 — This is another free one that can remove viruses really easily. Download this and you don’t have to worry to much.

  • Avast Home Edition — AVG does better than this one but people seem to like this so I have to add this for people who like this better than the others.

  • Clamwin Free Anti-virus — This is a good one because this is open sourced and easily can help detect so many viruses. This is good for those people who like open sourced.

These are just  the ones that I like to recommend that does pretty good on removing the viruses but there are others that I recommend on my Malware Resources that people have recommend to me but I haven’t tried them out yet.    Some of the Spyware and Adware removal and here are some of my favorites:

  • SuperAntispyware — Easily remove pests such as WinFixer, SpyAxe, SpyFalcon, and thousands more! Repair broken Internet Connections, Desktops, Registry Editing and more with our unique Repair System.

  • Malwarebytes — can provide the needed assistance to remove the infection and restore the machine back to optimum performance.

  • Ad-Aware — This is a very good tool to get rid of some of the most annoying little viruses that try to fool you that you have a virus.

  • Windows Security Trojan Scanner — a Free online scanner to let you see if you might have a Trojan.

  • SmitFraudFix — A great little program to get rid of those Desktop hijacks, those programs that take over your browser or other file system.

If your current antimalware software let an infection through, you may want to consider purchasing the PRO version of SUPERAntiSpyware or Malwarebytes License to protect your computer in the future. SUPERAntiSpyware Professional or Malwarebytes License features highly advanced Real-Time Protection to ensure protection from installation or re-installation of potential threats as you surf the Internet (Both are trusted Vendors by CCSS Forums).

These are just a few that I like to use when it comes to fighting those virus programs and the people behind the virus programs.   If you consider how hard it is sometimes to recognize a virus, you can see the problem with some of the programs they can sometimes  say a file is a virus and delete it and the next thing you know it won’t boot into Windows.  This is what needs to be considered whenever you see a warning on your system so you must be careful when you remove files.  You should always have backups that is what I always recommend because the likely hood of something terrible happening to your data.  You should come up with a way to back up your system every week like a sunday back or even a Monday while your at work backup.