Author Archives: John Barrett
Complementary security tools
It’s interesting what vision has PC users with not a lot of experience about their antivirus, how they feel about that software. It’s more about a feeling, yes, they perceive the antivirus like a comrade who defend them fighting back against all kind of nasty malware and zombies for their safety and peace, look how people speak about their antivirus : “my antivirus says this or says that…” Well, if it’s about a comparison between an antivirus and a bodyguard who must defend me against the Internet threats, the bodyguard is a blind person when it comes about new threats and here you must consider as a fact that daily …
"Hacking the Hacker" — Network Security
The common way to protect against network threats is installing a Firewall, which theoretically will block all attempting to establish a malicious connection, protecting the computer. It is well-known fact that always first step a hacker do trying to hack a computer in a network is a port scanning to find what ports are open and can be used to “communicate” with the target computer. Ports are in range from 0 to 65535, and some of them are assigned for special use as : File Transfer Protocol(FTP) connections — port 21 Telnet — port 23 Hypertext Transfer Protocol(HTTP) — ports 80 and 81 HTTP over Transport Layer Security — port …
Malicious behaviour — PC Confidential 2008
Today, when I was cleaning up my kids PC, I saw on the Desktop an object, kind of icon, with name “Shredder” without an extension and with a behaviour characteristic to many malware programs –it locks itself on the desktop taking off the possibility to delete it and it has only two context menu(right-click) options: Open Create Shortcut This is how the icon looks like : For all other files from the Desktop I have a lot of options as you all know like Delete, Rename, Cut, Copy, Open with, entries added by WinRAR(Add to archive), entries added by my antivirus for scanning the file in discussion, and entries …
Programs analysis tools — Sandboxie "add-ons"
These days, when many software vendors are ready to do anything to increase their incomes, including embedding adware and other unwanted programs in their products for advertising and marketing purposes, to analyse a program carefully before to run it, it’s a normal and desirable behaviour install it fully in the computer. I’m talking about less-known programs, sometimes spreaded as freeware, sometimes advertised as program that will do “miracles” in the computer and finishing dropping adware and spyware in the computer of a naïve user. Using virtual environments as a VMware machine, or a sandbox which will emulate an Operating System are the preffered methods for analysis because they give the …
Malware infections — prevention and cure
A simple look at statistics from last 24h in virustotal.com site reveal the fact that only 2% from the files submitted are detected by the ALL antivirus engine, for the rest of 98% one or more antiviruses are failing in detection. There is tests that shows aproximately only 20% of new trojans are detected by an antivirus, any of them, it does not matter but my believing is the percentage is in reality lower than 20%, maybe 1 -5 % of new trojans – zero day attacks are detected by an antivirus because speaking of unknown and newly created trojans, only heuristic and file emulation can be used as …
What not to click ?–Clicking & Phishing
Unless you are a Command Prompt guru, you normally will use the computer by clicking “things” on the desktop, so you have all the chances to get infected clicking “bad things” on the Web. The experts from the security vendor Avast, estimate that 85% from the computer infections are the results of using inadequate the Internet and clicking neglectful the links. The Social Networking sites as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace are the preffered targets of hackers, due to the high volume traffic they receive. It is well known the attacks using sexy video or naked photo links, the users attention beeing disturbed by the temptingly content. The rules for preventing computer …
Are the sensitive data permanently deleted ?
All of us know that every time when we are deleting a file or folder under Microsoft Windows, they are moved in the Recycle Bin folder giving us the chance to restore at a later date the deleted files form there. But after emptying the Recycle Bin ? Well, the files and folders can be restored after that as well, but the procedure is a bit more complicated, must be used some software to recover deleted data, as WinUtilities Free Undelete 3.1 (free) , R-Undelete File Recovery Software 3.5 , Undelete It! 3.17 or other software, there are a plenty on the Internet. The recovery procedure is based on the …
