Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can interact with the team via chat room or BBS at www.thepcgurus.com. There are usually members present in the chat room after 8:00 PM every evening and you can post computer questions, comments, rants etc. on the bulletin board 24/7.
If you’re new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin’s website at http://www.jpdurbin.net. There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.
The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
1-27-05
We speak often of computer viruses in this newsletter, sometimes resorting to sending out special editions to warn of particularly dangerous or virulent outbreaks. To an end user these things, while annoying and certainly dangerous in as far as they may delete or otherwise compromise critical information and could lend themselves to identity theft, they aren’t going to do you physical harm.
It’s an entirely different story for corporations and utilities. Viruses are a serious threat to control systems for everything from chemical plants to electric companies to dams and water treatment plants. Compromising computers running these types of facilities could cause widespread damage and loss of life such that the Federal Government has special teams set up to combat such “cyber-terrorism”.
We’ve already seen some examples of this sort of attack, although the virus author may not have exactly intended it. The Blaster worm, introduced in late 2003, shut down services ranging from airline reservation and ticket processing systems to ATMs, thereby doing some slight damage to our transportation and economic infrastructures. The Nachia worm, following up on Blaster a week later, shut down other government services.
These were not targeted viruses, just viruses written to spread quickly and reboot computers. The fact that they caused so much damage to our critical infrastructure without even meaning to should give pause to every citizen.
That’s old news and there haven’t been any other major outbreaks since. The Sasser worm from early last year came close but didn’t have anywhere near the effect, although it did manage to put a pretty good hurt on Bank of America.
Recently the trend seems to be to infect cellular phone systems. Not that computer viruses have gone away, far from it, but as more devices start using embedded computers the threat becomes more personal.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/01/cabir_skulls_combo/ warns of a combined trojan/worm that infects mobile phones using the Symbian Series 60 OS, spreading via Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a short-range radio frequency technology that allows computerized devices to communicate with each other over short distances.
You may wonder how mobile phone viruses and exploits can be all that dangerous.
How about a hacker that had access to the entire T-Mobile system for over a year? Customer information, including date of birth and Social Security numbers, personal correspondence and pictures sent using popular Sidekick devices, as well as classified Secret Service communications were wide open to Nicolas Jacobson (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050112-4517.html).
Not enough? How about a virus that infects the navigation systems in some Lexus Landcruiser vehicles? According to http://www.infosecnews.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsDetails&newsUID=bc5789cf-e448-4a6e-bee9-a5dd291405ed&newsType=News the LX470 and LS430 are vulnerable to a virus that spreads through the Bluetooth technology built into the on-board mobile phones.
Elsewhere in the same article it’s mentioned that Mikko Hypponen, virus research director at F-Secure, has seen screenshots of major commercial airlines using Windows 2000 on their planes.
I’ll take corded phones, ’79 Mercury Bobcats and staying on the ground for 100, Alex…
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Ben Goodger,
the lead developer behind Firefox, is in the process of
moving to
Google. Can a Googlized browser be far behind?
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/developer/google-firefox-goodger-39995.html
Texas
Instruments has unveiled a mobile phone on a chip. Now you can
finally
have that tooth phone you've always wanted:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/chips/0,39020354,39185441,00.htm
From
our "Ummm, Yeah, That'll Stop 'Em" Department, the Bush
Administration has
petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn lower
court rulings that
allowed the copying of recordings and movies
through file peer-to-peer
software technology:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=57703723
SBC
has signed a deal to bring wireless web access to California state
parks:
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Wi-Fi-Takes-a-Walk-in-the-Park&story_id=29993
Copy
us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.opaquelucidity.com
MozBackup is a handy little program, built by a developer named Shazam and designed to back up any data that you have in Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, or Mozilla Thunderbird. Since everyone is making the switch over to these alternative products, there was a need to make their somewhat tedious back up procedures more user-friendly. That’s where MozBackup steps in. It works by taking your profiles from these programs and compacting all the files included in it. This works great for backup purposes, either when you are reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows or if you are just doing your usual backups of your data. (You are backing up often, aren't you? ;-))
Just download the program from http://www.download.com/MozBackup/3000-2378_4-10304556.html, install it and run it. When you get to the first screen, you’ll pick what program you want to back up from or restore to, and whether you want to back up or restore. The next screen will ask you what profile you want to back up from the selected program, and will ask you where to save the file. The third (and final) screen asks you what you want to back up, and you’ll want to do every checkmark box that is available for Firefox, and every box except for “E-mail settings only” for Thunderbird. Then, just hit the final Next and the program does its thing. Now just take that file, put it with the rest of your backed up files, and it’s ready to be restored when you finish reinstalling everything. Now, per the author of this programs site: http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/ (which may be down) or http://tinyurl.com/6yhnm this is the final version and may be apt to disappear at any time. So go and get it while it is still out there. Hope this serves you well and have a good day computing!
Daniel A. Williams
What can I say about Art Maley? He’s the once and future king of the weekly download tips, he practically owns the chatroom, his knowledge of Windows and networking are astounding and women swoon when he enters a room. OK, that about sums it up ;)
From http://www.thepcgurus.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1#art:
“Art Maley handles the IT duties for the EBGames Louisville Distribution Center. EBGames is the world's largest specialty retailer of gaming software and hardware with over 1500 retail stores in 10 countries.”
Q: I cannot seem to remove the
exact.downloader file that keeps getting
detected on the new Microsoft
Spyware beta program. It says that it
deletes it, but then when I run the
scan again it is still there. Is
there something else that I can
use?
A: I wonder if the anti-spyware program is
removing the offending file,
but it comes back because the spyware program
has infected your System
Restore Files. Viruses and Trojans often do
that, so there's nothing
stopping a spyware program from doing the
same. I am assuming you have
Windows XP or Me, which has System Restore
functionality.
Try the following:
If you have Windows XP or
Windows Me, Disable System Restore. Here are the instructions to do
that:
http://www.brohm.org/SystemRestore.htm
Next,
reboot your computer in SAFE Mode. Restart your computer and tap
the F8
or F5 key repeatedly till you see a black and white menu screen.
Pick the
Safe Mode option.
Once in Safe Mode, run the anti-spyware program and let
it do its
thing. Once cleaned, restart the computer and it will come
back to
normal mode.
Re-enable System Restore.
If you want to
try another anti-spyware program, you can download and
try Spybot
from:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html
or
Ad-Aware from:
http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Both
of them are excellent programs and are free.
Hash
hash@ucanweb.com
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