Category: Windows

Everything About Windows

Free Syncronization and Backup programs

Paul

So I talked about finding some free backup utilities on the Mike Tech Show Listener Roundtable Show # 234.

I said I would publish some good free ones programs to backup your system files and I think I have done it.  Here’s are some great ones that I recommend for anyone who doesn’t want to pay for a backup program:

Allway Sync —  Works with Windows Vista/XP.  It supports : Hard Drives, Removable Hard Drives, Network Drives, Amazon S3, FTP Server, Offsitebox.com, and WEBDAV Folder.  This program is also quite portable and can be used on more than one computer with the portable version.[ad#text-broadband2]

ViceVersa — Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista. Vice Verse FREE will compare files in two folders (source and target) and synchronize file differences.  There isn’t much else you can do with this but It does look to be good for small backups and older system.

Acebackups — is a powerful tool to create completely secure backups of your data. Store your data on any local storage device, on CD, DVD or on your remote FTP server!

The one I have been using that is the most useful for me is Allway Sync.  I have it set up to use my [intlink id=”3059″ type=”post”]A600 Cricket Modem w/the 4 Gig Mini SD card[/intlink] to back up my [intlink id=”2646″ type=”post”]Roboform[/intlink] Passwords.  I could buy the Roboform portable version and use this to keep backup’s on my hard drive.  Allway Sync also has a portable version for multiple computers.   I think this is the most versatile, for the needs of backup.  Something that I have done is backing up my important data to a portable Harddrive, Flash drive and backing up to a ftp server to make sure I don’t loose any data.  I have it set up to have redundancy.  You should always have more than one backup.

In the coming Miketechshow Listener Round Table Discussion, we will be talking about backing up and the need to back.  I encourage everyone to join on that discussion.  I would like to know what you do with how you back up and if you back up.  I’ll post the time and Date when I find out!!

Malicious Spammers target Bank of America

Paul

I’ve saw two different security firms talking about Bank of America and I wanted to share with you:

Fake Bank Of America SitePicture from F-secure

[ad#cricket-right-ez]The two sites are F-secure and Pandalabs who are talking about Bank of America and how they try to get you to install malware.  With Adobe having just sent out the new updates last month it looks like spammers are using this to get people to install Malware.

It is also been known to be floating around in Facebook this spam.  So if you get a link going to a site you don’t know about to see a video and it says you need a codec or the Adobe update you should turn right around and leave site. You should always type in the url of Your Bank and not go there through links.

From what they are saying it monitors Network traffic and Steals ICQ, POP3, and IMAP passwords.  If you find network traffic going to Hong Kong IP, then it is time to check to make sure all your Virus definitions are up to date and you’ve installed an Anti-virus and Firewall.  I would encourage  users to report it to Phishtank so that any other unsuspecting user or person going to that site will be warned.

Is Google the ultimate news source?

Paul

As you know We had a big problem Monday Night and All day Tuesday. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you would of noticed either a 503 or lag. It was due to an article that I released late Monday night about the PIFTS.EXE and the so call conspiracy.

At the time, I was wondering and quite disturbed about what Norton Symantec was doing to the forums. So I blogged about this and wouldn’t you know my site was Held Hostage by Google. I kid you not, I had so many people come to my site in under an hour it wasn’t even funny.

[ad#cricket-right-ez]So I sit here, asking a really good question is Google the News? I don’t know exactly when but according to Wikipedia Google was formed in 1998. The Google Motto is Don’t Be Evil, and I guess it makes them look like a news source. When did they get past the news site? I would hazard a guess that it was in late 2004 they started when they when Google gave people the first chance to own the stock on August 19, 2004, when Google became a publicly held company.

I got hit hard by Slashdot, Reddit.com, and Google.  In truthfulness, It was more of searches and people coming from Google than anywhere else. I would say Google was the 90% and and Slashdot and Redidit was 8% and the rest was from other websites for this one article. Now don’t get me wrong the 2% of people was my normal amount of people for the day. So you can imagine how many people actually came to my site over this fiasco.

I call this a fiasco because basically it was one that really made me worry about the server going down. People seemed to try to find out about this program and some of them didn’t even do any more research than to come to my site? Although I do know a little, I have always considered myself to be a BLUE COLLAR Tech Blogger. So you can just call me “The Blue Collar Tech Blogger” when it comes to things like this. I will never proclaim I know everything and I am still learning every day I blog I learn something new.

So this leaves me with a question on how did Blogs become the news also?  Did we step into the roll of news?  I know there are many blogs out there that are telling the news and are almost as if they are the news.  Is that where this has become Web 2.0?  I throw these questions out to see what type of comment.  I just thought this was a good topic for today to talk about.

Thinking back to PIFTS.EXE.

Paul

Thinking to this very incident looks to something out of the movie “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events“.  I won’t go into much detail but here is what I want answers to about the PIFTS.EXE.  You see after I have read a great article talking in detail about this, I have also come to the conclusion something isn’t right.

[ad#cricket-right-ez]The blog owner known as Anshar in the forums on the Symantec points out some key events. He wanted to point out that the users who were posting were not violating the TOS and was posting questions that look to asking about this file. See screen capture of what I took. This one picture doesn’t prove his theory in whole, but does bring up some suspicions. This actually might be them trying to find a ‘scapegoat’ so to speak. He also talks about what others are asking? What is PIFTS.EXE? People seem to still have not be answered that question.

Although, in Norton’s defense there seems to be a lot of information that they have to sort through. I’ll admit this information people are asking should be really simple to find in the Symantec Databases somewhere. I will not say they are hiding anything major but I do think something is going on that we are not aware of. Here’s some other thoughts to considers? If Norton needed to find out who was using Windows 7, couldn’t they of asked or even made a simple site redirect to find that information, after all anytime you visit a site you have that information sent to the stats. I could in theory find out how many visitors are visiting from Macs and how many are on older systems. That would be very easy to do with Google Analytics.

Now with that said let’s talk about Why it took almost a whole day for them to release a public statement about what happened.  I might be wrong but if I was a stockholder, I’d of demanded them to send that out ASAP instead of waiting 20 to 24 hours.  Although I’m not trying to make any more conspiracy theories, I do think the Streisand effect came into effect and people are feeling like Norton did something they shouldn’t have.  In which case, Norton probably made “A fail whale” attempt of making it better when they started to delete the post.

I’ve been watching the Norton forums trying to make sense of all this, and I do know that Norton have lost people’s faith in them and people are removing their product off there systems if Norton doesn’t start answering questions that need to be answered.

Norton has released the information of PIFTS.EXE and what it does. Although I am sure people are going to argue about what it does or doesn’t. I wanted to post this for people to check out and consider for yourself.

Let’s Clear this up — PIFTS.EXE

Paul6 Replies

I just wanted to clear up some things about PIFTS.EXE.  I read a Most Interesting Article about this over at Bleeping Computers.  He talks about how tested this on his system and I’ll quote:

After reading about this file here and here, I asked around on BleepingComputer.com for one of our users to submit a sample of the file to me. Once I received the file, I ran it on a test box while running a file monitor, to see what it accesses, and Wireshark, to see what it does on the network. What I found was that the program appears to be quite innocent, and from the hostname it connects to, we could have guessed as to what it does. It appears that when you update Norton it connects to stats.norton.com and lets the server know someone has installed an update, what the update was, what program it was for, and whether it was successful. Now, I am not saying that Norton should be contacting one of their servers and reporting this type of information without a user’s permission or even knowledge, but there is no conspiracy theory between Norton, Google, Microsoft, African Nations, and little green men.

[Via Bleeping Computers]

[ad#cricket-right-ez]So Let’s Talk about this a little more, It does connect to stats.norton.com and tell norton that it it has installed the update.  Like he says, I agree although Notron isn’t trying to be the bad guy. I, like everyone else, also thought something was amiss when they started deleting forums post.  Instead of locking them down.  You see it makes them look suspicious and that started a flurry of people posting about this.  I do know they should of been truthful from the get go.  I just heard about this today and wanted to remind people that I meant what I said.  Don’t go overboard because your think your trust with a company was mislead. You know that they have to protect their service to prevent unauthorized access to there software and get what money they deserve.  However They should of been open from the start with this on there main page or in the forums talking about how this happened in the first place.

In Symantec’s defense, when I first heard about this earlier this morning, I noted privately to a couple of folks that some of the comments being left on the Symantec forum bore many of the hallmarks of “4Chan,” (a.k.a. “anonymous”), a virtual community that thrives on playing practical jokes and causing trouble online. The summary about this incident posted to News-for-nerds site Slashdot this morning links to a key 4Chan forum.

[Via Bleeping Computers]

Now they couldn’t say something like this either in there forums as a sticky note or on there Website?  This was why they started to delete the forum threads without telling anyone what happened.  I understand they have the right to delete what they want when they want, it was probably an over zealous moderator.  I wanted to clear this up a little so the virus theories and the conspiracy theories would go away.   I know some website are being over zealous over this and claiming it is doing things it isn’t.  I was just trying to inform but others seemed to run with it and come up with all kinds of theories.  So please let’s take a deep breathe and understand that you have several options as to what you want to do.  I haven’t recommended people removing Norton, and I still don’t recommend removing from your system.  I will always tell people that there is Free versions of Anti-virus and Firewalls available.    Like I said in my previous post these were post made by people on the forums and I was taking screen shots to proof that there was something going on.

I hope this clarify what is going on with Norton Antivirus. I’ll still recommend it for people who can afford it, because it does a good job on anti-virus.

[READ More about this at Symantec]