Computer Tips -Tech Info

Once upon a time I did an article about the biggest computer security vulnerability ever. I’ve also passed along the old “the most dangerous part of a car is the nut behind the wheel” joke. If you haven’t got it yet, the computer user can be the “weakest link”. Let’s face it, you’ve got antivirus, a firewall, all the current windows updates, antispyware and a website pops up. The website looks like Windows security center and says you have a virus and need to get official antivirus software.

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I’ve toyed around with the idea of migrating everything over to Kontact for my mail. I’ve used Evolution since moving over to linux, but there are some things about Kontact that just seem slicker to me. While I was doing the install, I had the laptop setup to receive messages through IMAP and used Kontact as the client. There were a few features that I wanted to spend a bit more time with. So, the first thing is getting the data into Kontact.

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For those that read this I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I have several posts scheduled to come out each day through the 1st of the New Year, but will likely not be adding to that unless something big happens. I’ll also be taking the week away from scheduled computer appointments. I’m one of those people that has a hard time setting tasks aside, but this time of year is usually the best opportunity for me to have a week away from the typical routine of chasing computer problems.

I hope that everyone will have an opportunity during this Holiday season to reflect on those things that are truly important which aren’t necessarily those same things that we spend everyday working with.

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In the spirit of the day before Christmas, I’ve come across a couple links to help you track Santa Claus’ progress around the world. First up the Google Blog points out that you can track Santa with their Google Earth software. They have a link here that will open in Google Earth –UPDATE Christmas 2006–This years link for the Google KML is here. (if installed. Google Earth is a free download and requires hardware video acceleration. The other link is a web browser based tracker… Norad has been doing this for a few years, this years version is at this link. (Flashplayer required.)

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I’ve talked about Antivirus software as an essential. Today we’re going to look at Antispyware software. There is a difference. By definition a virus is a piece of software that infects other files or copies itself. A worm is a virus that spreads without user intervention. (From one open network port to another for instance.) Spyware is not necessarily in either category. Spyware is the name given to software that tracks online behavior, some may track online searches, some may be more invasive and track anything typed in to the computer!

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All in all, what I’ve documented was a bit over three hours worth of attention to the machine (much more for the full scans, but I didn’t have to stand and watch them.) I didn’t document a sidetrip to a second antivirus scanner. It’s nice to see a system cleaned up that had been so thoroughly infected. There are a couple other notes I should pass along though. When a system has been trojaned the BEST advice is to wipe the disc and reinstall from scratch. (Erase/reformate/install from scratch.)

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Nobody wants to be tied to their job over the holidays, but what if someone has hacked your servers and is using your machine to scam thousands of people a day? Does that keep for two weeks? Does someone monitor the abuse address? Incidents.org has a post on messages they’ve got from some reporting to abuse administrators receiving back vacation notices that things are basically on “autopilot until sometime next year.”

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Incidents.org writes to remind as that bot’s aren’t just for Windows. The recent PHP exploits have seen the use of the “kaiten” bot. After infection on the system it connects to an IRC server. It would primarily target linux systems. They do give a very good way to blunt most Linux bot-style malwares…

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I think it’s time to wrap things up. The KDE start new session option is back after the changes I mentioned to the /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc file I mentioned in a previous post. There are no outstanding issues from the upgrade. (I need to adjust the font sizes down a bit, but that’s not a big deal.) This series, of course, has been spread out over days. The actual event covered two afternoon’s/evening’s. The first day was the attempted urpmi upgrade (which didn’t go too well.)

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I’ll likely be adding a few more categories to better be able to organize my posts. When I started out with this format, I thought nested categories were a good idea. After seeing them in practice, I’m thinking I may wind up renaming some existing categories so that things maybe will make a bit more sense. Anyway, this is just a “heads up” to let you know that the structure of categories will likely be changing if not this week, after the new year.

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