Archive : General Tips

This infographic in the source link provides clues to why Facebook is such a prime target. Source It all has to do with numbers; who has the most to have malware target. Why turn to a small community when you have millions of folk to target for the same effort. Microsoft battled all comers during the days of DOS to become the over-all winner. The results of that winning the battle of the Operating Systems has resulted in what is called the computer monoculture. According to Wikipedia, during [...]

Freedom to install free software When done correctly, “Secure Boot” is designed to protect against malware by preventing computers from loading unauthorized binary programs when booting. In practice, this means that computers implementing it won’t boot unauthorized operating systems — including initially authorized systems that have been modified without being re-approved. Source The above is a place trying to get signatures for a petition not to have it mandatory to install [...]

In today’s world it is common for the hacker to find flaws that can be exploited in software allowing access where there should be none. Those being found for the first time and not already known are rare but are called zero day because there is no defense against it until it is understood how it is done and therefor how to block that method. Those that hack for bad (known as black hat), when getting a hold of such knowledge as unknown methods to access computers by weakness in code, will often [...]

I have no answers for the question, just examples and other questions. If you’ve been living under a rock the last year, malware writers have been finding holes to use digital certificates to slip in to computers. What are digital certificates? From Webopedia: An attachment to an electronic message used for security purposes. The most common use of a digital certificate is to verify that a user sending a message is who he or she claims to be, and to provide the receiver with the means to encode [...]

Let’s take a look at the next scenario: in a morning when you check your emails, you find one with the subject “Top Ten jokes about wives” or … “Eva Mendes naked in the pool” but the sender is unknown to you. The email has a PDF file as attachment or maybe contains a link, what are you gonna do? Perhaps you think: if the attachment is not an executable then it can not be a virus and it’s safe to open it or if it’s about a website, it’s safe to [...]

These days we assist at a worldwide growing threat, the Ransom Trojan(named so by Kaspersky, and Winlock by Dr.web) which is a quite large family. The behaviour of this kind of computer trojan is different from variant to variant but as a general rule they blocks the files and folders access and demand money to restore the normal functionality. The victims are blocked out of the computer, the keyboard and the mouse are partially disabled and a message window appears announcing basically that the [...]

Coming from the oldest computing times,the boot record viruses remain still one of the most preffered attack vectors. Like their predecessors, the Stoned computer virus(created 1987), Brain(created 1986 and the first PC virus !), Michelangel0(1991), Elk Cloner(1980), actual boot record viruses use the same method of infection: they replace boot record codes with infected code. For who does know what is a boot record Master Boot Record(MBR) or Volume Boot Record(VBR) the advantages of a such infection [...]