WyzGuys Tech Talk

Sony has done plenty of damage to its already tarnished reputation for going with proprietary formats that ultimately fail (Betamax, BluRay?), and for hardware issues (flaming laptop batteries), and security issues (CD rootkit scandal).  Now they are at it again, putting a rootkit on a USB key drive.  See the following article.

Nutshell, Finnish security company F-Secure has reported to have found software with rootkit-like behaviour supplied with Sony USB sticks with a built-in fingerprint reader.

"The Sony MicroVault USM-F fingerprint ...

(From PC Magazine)  Kaspersky is one of the leading anti-virus companies, and in June they released their ranking for the top 10 best (or worst) malicious software designs of the year.

Lets just say that if you get one of these, you have got a problem!

1. Greediest Trojan targeting banks: Trojan-Spy.Win32.Banker.aqu, a modification that targets 87 banks simultaneously.

2. Greediest Trojan targeting e-payment systems: Trojan-PSW.Win32.VB.kq, which targets four e-payment systems.

3. Stealthiest malicious ...

Beware e-mails purporting to be an "e-card" from "friends" or "family".  If there is not a name of someone you know directly identified in the e-mail, you are being lured into a spam botnet.  See the PC Magazine article excerpt below, and click on the link to read the entire article.

Thursday August 23, 2007

Storm Worm Attacks Take On New Disguises

The big effort to build a new botnet these days is through the Storm ...

Here’s an important bit from PC Magazine.  Evidently there are
phishing exploits arriving in your e-mail box pretending to be from
GoDaddy, a popular Domain Name Registrar.  Do not respond to these
messages, or click on any links in the e-mail.  Those of you hosting
with my hosting service, WyzHost, would never get anything from
GoDaddy because I do not use them.

Questions?  Call me or drop me an e-mail.

The ...

George Ou from ZDNet has published this excellent article.  i followed the directions and achieved a much improved start up and operational environment on my two year old Toshiba laptop.

The article links are below, and I have included a PDF file courtesy of TechRepublic that you can save for your own use.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=547&page=2

How to fully de-gunk a PC of crapware
That pre-bundled software can make your PC sluggish, unstable, and prone to crashes. George ...

Here is a handy tip from Greg Schultz at TechRepublic.  If you have a USB flash drive with several media types stored oin board, such as pictures, music, and document files, you may prefer to have Windows Explorer to open automatically do yo can browse to your files more quickly.  Here’ how to do it.

Takeaway: AutoPlay can be fickle when it comes to determining the default action for opening files from your flash drive. Here’s how to ...

I have been recommending Zone Alarm Security Suite as my favorite security solution for several years.  They have always, and continue, to rank in the first, second , or more rarely, third spot when reviewed by PC Magazine Labs.  I recently had a question from one of my students, and I thought the exchange was worth posting in the blog.  It follows:

HI BOB – I STILL HAVEN’T TAKEN NORTON OFF OR PUT ZONE ALARM ON.  I’M HAVING SECOND ...