Tag: Browser

Say Goodbye to Sluggish Browsing: A Quick and Easy Cache Clearing Tutorial

Paul
Edge Browser

Why should I clear my cache?

The simple answer is the most important. You have a limited amount of space on any given space. Most of the time it might not be a problem but if you like to visit sites constantly then you may get unwanted files stored on your system that could slow your system down and even slow down your browser experience. It depends on how fast your system will react to your browsing and what happens when you get some bad cache files from websites.   This can help clear those up and stop all those popups that maybe becoming annoying to you.  You might get advertisements and other pop ups that will cause problems while you are trying to use your computer.

How Do I clear my cache in Google Chrome and Edge?

The real questions is how you would do this quickly and easily to help you get where you can have your browser speed up and non intrusive as it should be.   If you are getting popups or something that looks like a browser page then this is where you should start.   Clear your cache and get rid of the potenital cache causing problems.   Here’s how to do it easily and quickly:

On Google Chrome Press CTL-SHIFT-DEL, while you have Google Chrome up and running this is the quickest way to clear your cache in Chrome.

Google Chrome – Make sure you clear all the cache and click on Clear Data at the bottom to make sure you clear everything out of Chrome.

If you want to make sure you get all the data, you should select ‘All time” in Time Range and check all boxes to make sure you remove all necessary files off of Google Chrome.  Once done close out Google Chrome and restart and you should have a cleaner experience with Google Chrome.

Windows Edge Browser

On Windows Edge Browser copy and past this into your address bar.

edge://settings/privacy

Once there you should see something like this:

Select “Choose what to Clear”
Clear Cache in Edge

This will be the same thing as you did with Google Chome select Time range “All Time” and make sure to check the first 4 options available and hit Clear Now as edge removes all the cache that was collected over time.  Once done exit out of edge and then start it up and you should have no more problems with popups as long as you don’t have a different browser.   If you have a different you should search for how to clear the cache in those types of browsers.

What if you can’t delete the cache?

In Google Chrome the best and easily way to fix this to load up chrome in incognito mode and then try to delete the cache that way.  However this may or may not work depending on what might be causing this.

One Edge the easily pres Windows Key + R and type “start msedge -inprivate“.  Once you do that then try to clear the browser cache and see if that allows you to clear the cache.  The last part of this is that you might need to reboot your system to allow the system to complete some update or problems that might not allow you to clear cache for some reason or other.

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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.

Being a Bad BOT!

Paul7 Replies

badbot1

I had the strangest thing happen today, Seemed a Bad Bot was Crawling my pages. I was getting at least 60 page views an hour from this bad Bot!! The individual IP’s of this Bad Are:

65.208.151.112
65.208.151.113
65.208.151.114
65.208.151.115
65.208.151.116
65.208.151.117
65.208.151.118
65.208.151.119

[ad#ad2-right]After the first initial hour of this going on, I started wondering what this bot was doing.   I did some more research into this little bot.   I did find out it is owned by Kintiskton LLC.  (Twitter Search)

Anyways It bothers me that when you do a Google Search for this company, it comes back with no company.  Some people have already did there research and have come up with very little.

I dug even more and some are saying this might be Homeland Security, and I have my own thoughts on this.   I might be paranoid myself but if there is no company out there and the IP keeps coming back, I assume it is BAD mojo.  Some people worry that it is a hacker probing for vulnerabilities and that worried me.

I decided with the Help from Godaddy, to ban the lot of IPs.  I figure someone is trying to get information or trying something they shouldn’t, I’ll stop it myself.   If you have WordPress and are also having problems with this ip, you can ban it by adding this to your HtAccess file:

order allow,deny
deny from 65.208.151.112
deny from 65.208.151.113
deny from 65.208.151.114
deny from 65.208.151.115
deny from 65.208.151.116
deny from 65.208.151.117
deny from 65.208.151.118
deny from 65.208.151.119
allow from all

This is how you block those ip in the HtAccess file. Thanks to WordPress for showing me how.

IE vulnerability in the Wild

Paul

Well this was bound to happen, hackers found this vulnerability and is using it for their own purposes.  [ad#ad2-right]It seems they put a virus on your system.  Microsoft has issued an Recommendation and to check out Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-055.

“What we’ve seen from the exploit so far is it stealing game passwords, but it’s inevitable that it will be adapted by criminals,” he said. “It’s just a question of modifying the payload the trojan installs.”

Said Mr Ferguson: “If users can find an alternative browser, then that’s good mitigation against the threat.”

[Via BBC News]

[ad#ad2-left]I personally like to recommend a program that will do a better job at security and that is Firefox,  I also suggest people use the Thunderbird and not Microsoft mail program.  This will greatly reduce your likely hood of getting a virus or Trojan.   Most of the time hackers like to find new ways to infection to get into your system.  If you want to preven having a virus in the future, I’d recommend going to my Malware Resource and check out a good firewall and anti-virus.   This will prevent you from getting some of the viruses and other types of malware.

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.