News: Beware the Master Blaster

By | November 24, 2011
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 Lots of warnings doing the rounds about a new worm — called, variously, W32/Blaster-A Lovsan, MSBlaster or Poza — which is designed to hijack computers which are then programmed to automatically launch a denial-of-service attack on the website “windowsupdate.com”, from Saturday, August 16 onwards.  Ironically, this website, operated by Microsoft, is used to deliver software patches to Microsoft customers.
 
The Blaster worm does not spread via email, but does distribute itself via the internet looking for vulnerable computers that have not been patched against a security hole first reported by Microsoft in mid-July. Advice: make sure you have the latest Windows patches installed, and have your virus library up to date.

Software: Another Spam Service…

By | November 24, 2011
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 Once more reinforcing the impression this is spamblog central, here’s another product that promises to rid you of spam (99.5% of it to be precise). PrismEmail.com was launched today by Vault Information Services (VIS) — it can be used with any operating system or email program, doesn’t require that anything be installed on the user’s computer, and works with the user’s
existing email address such that no change in email address is necessary.
 
 
Spam is filtered by the server before being downloaded by the user. PrismEmail offers a 30-day free trial. Oh, and it also uses my favourite, Bayesian statistical filtering. Might be worth a try.

News: Beware The Password

By | November 24, 2011
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 As if you didn’t know it already, (and I’ve posted about this before) your Windows passwords are not safe. According to an article on TechExtreme, some Swiss researchers have published a paper detailing how to crack Windows computers protected by alphanumeric passwords in an average of 13.6 seconds.
 
Their approach can crack 99.9 percent of all alphanumerical passwords in 13.6 seconds, against a previous 101 seconds. The bottom line: When you can, include non-alphanumeric characters in your password, such as a question mark or a plus sign.

Software: A Way To Avoid The Messaging Nasties

By | November 24, 2011
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 Do a lot of online chat, or instant messaging (IM)? If you do, you’re as vulnerable to nasty folk trying to do nasty things to your computer as using email, including viruses, worms and other ways to get information from your PC, take over your PC or just to make it stop working.
 
 
The good news is that Zone Labs, who make the excellent Zone Alarm firewall (a firewall is a piece of software that tries to keep out some of these nasties), will today launch a product to specifically target IM threats to your computer. IMsecure Pro 1.0 IM traffic and blocks malicious code and spam, encrypts messages sent between IMsecure users and allows users to set rules on outgoing messages and block features such as file transfers and voice and video chats.
 
IMsecure Pro works with Yahoo’s Messenger, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger, and America Online’s AOL Instant Messenger and costs $19.95. A free, dressed-down version of the product for personal and nonprofit users will be available by the end of the month. Given how useful Zone Alarm is, I’d keep an eye out for this. At the time of writing the product had not been posted.

News: Hard Times For The Hard Drive

By | November 24, 2011
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 Just when you thought hard drives couldn’t get any bigger…. they don’t. Interesting piece called Midlife crisis for the hard drive by CNET’s Ed Frauenheim says growth in hard drive capacity, after doubling annually during some periods, is beginning to slow “as engineers run into technological obstacles and many PC buyers feel they have more than enough space”.
 
 
Speak for yourself: I have five hard drives now and still seem to be short.