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.
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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.
2-4-05
According to http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5560664.html?tag=nl.e589
the amount of spam in your inbox is about to
skyrocket.
It seems spammers have developed a new zombie program that takes over an unsuspecting user’s PC and sends out massive amounts of spam emails, but this one has a twist. In the past such programs carried their own mail servers, basically turning the captive PC into a mini-ISP for mass mailing.
This one, on the other hand, hijacks the user’s email settings and uses their real ISP servers. An infected user’s account will be shutdown fairly quickly due to email abuse, to the surprise of said user I’m sure, but this method will spread thousands of emails from each zombie that bypass the biggest tool against spam, namely the blacklist.
Most ISPs depend on these blacklists, which are basically lists of known rogue ISPs that host spammers. These bad ISPs are added to the list and no email from their domains is allowed through, thus blocking many spam messages. But you can’t exactly block all of AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo.
This means IT troops at major providers are going to encounter an onslaught of abuse to their systems, possibly crashing many, and current staffing levels appear to be woefully inadequate for the task.
Antivirus and spyware cleaning firms are obviously adding the signatures of this new malware type as new versions are found in the wild but, unfortunately, so many PCs are online with little or no protection that the percentage of protected PCs is negligible.
Another zombie worm, Bropia-F, is currently spreading through MSN Messenger and not only sends spam, it also contains a key-logging component that records everything typed on the infected computer, exposing personal or confidential messages, credit card numbers and any number of other dangerous or embarrassing things.
Bropia-F is a variant of Phatbot worm.
According to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/04/msn_messenger_bropia_worm/ many corporations are banning the use of IM programs like MSN Messenger and AIM for this very reason. And of course to increase productivity. Hard to get any work done while you’re busily chatting away with your buddies.
You know the drill folks.
Kevin Mefford, Editor
In case you
somehow missed it, Microsoft announced their new search
engine on
Tuesday:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=59300269
Waiting
for the rumored G5 Powerbook? Don't get your checkbook out just
yet:
http://news.com.com/Apple+on+G5+PowerBook+Not+so+fast/2100-1044_3-5559311.html
HP
has announced new 'crossbar' technology that the company claims
could one day
replace transistors in microprocessors:
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3467491
The
19-year old who created one of the Blaster worm variants is going
to be doing
some time in the big house:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119503,00.asp
Copy
us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.opaquelucidity.com
The most important component of your PC is the hard drive. The processor does the actual computations and the RAM holds the files and programs that are active but all of your important data is stored on the hard drive. If that fails you may lose everything, especially if you don’t follow the three rules of computing. These are backup, backup and backup.
Between backups you can monitor the health and performance of your drives with the free HDDLife from http://www.hddlife.com/. It gives you real-time readouts while running quietly in the background, giving you a percentage compared to a new hard drive. It even monitors the temperature of the drives if your motherboard supports it.
The download is one of the newer .msi files that use the Microsoft Installer so it will only work on 2000, XP and 2003 systems.
John Markham is the team attorney, most famous for talking off-mic and checking his emails at three-week intervals but we love him nonetheless ;)
From http://www.thepcgurus.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1#john:
“John Markham has a mottled history. Starting in 1967 with the Burrows accounting machine at International Silver while he was at Choate (punch tape) to an IBM 360 at Tulane with punch cards and machine language (hex and octal), he moved into PCs in 1982 with his first Adam Osborne portable with a Z80 chip. Then he moved to the IBM desk top with PC Rentals, Inc.
He was President of the Kentucky Indiana Personal Computer Users Group for 2 terms. He was General Counsel for VenuSoft, Inc. a software development company in 2000 and is now General Counsel for SkyWay USA, Inc., a satellite broad band Internet provider.
He has harvested over 2,000 used PCs from local businesses which are refurbished by WaySide Christian Mission and distributed free to the homeless. He is a lawyer with a degree in Tax Law, a Founder and Board Mamber of Kentucky Harvest and is still trying to figure out what TPC/IP means...”
A: How can I stop the Windows Messenger
Service popups. I have a virus
protection & popup stopper on my PC.
However, I get 80-90 messenger
service popups a day. Please be detailed
since I am new at this stuff.
Q:
Microsoft has a great tutorial written up for this, here is the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/security/learnmore/stopspam.mspx
If
you need anything else, please, e-mail us back. Thanks for letting
us
help you!
Daniel A. Williams
daniel@thepcgurus.com
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