Computer Tips -Tech Info

Alright, so you’re still reading this series and you’re thinking. Look, I’m not protecting national security secrets. All I’m doing is (running a business|emailing my grandkids|using the web for research).

True, good point. You’re not at the defense department. OK. Let’s say you just use your computer for email and web browsing. That’s low priority stuff right? No sensitive information on your PC? Do you ever do banking online? Yes – then you should be concerned… No? You should still be concerned… here’s why…

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Before I get things wrapped up, I like to scan rinse and repeat until the scans come up clean. So, this scan of AVG gives a chance to delete the archive entry I mentioned the first pass it took. And spybot get’s updated from the internet and re-runs. All looks clean there… Ad-aware get’s an update check and runs again. Everything there looks clean now. The next thing to do is disable and uninstall tightvnc, I don’t want to leave bhodemon running at boot or the tea-timer from spybot now that things are fairly settled.

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Brian Krebs at the securityfix has a good article for those that are getting a new pc for Christmas (or those that know someone who is.) He has a nice outline of setting up limited privilege user accounts, installing windows updates, using a firewall and using antivirus. This is a nice concise guide to get a Windows machine tweaked to a fairly secure state.

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There are a couple of stories out about the Santa IM worm, otherwise known as IM.GiftCom.All. First up Sans has some interesting analysis of it. It appears that it’s being hosted at 69.56.129.67, when run it resolves smtp.girlsontheblock.com to 38.118.133.241 and attempts to open tcp port 53. It renames itself as c:\windows\winrpc.exe and sets up shop as “Windows RPC Services”. They’re saying instead of a worm it should be more accurately termed a bot with replicating capabilities, it is reliant on controls from an outside site. (From their analysis I presume the 69. ip address above?)

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Details of a vulnerability in Apple’s Quicktime and iTunes reported at betanews.com. Secunia also has an advisory. It is listed as moderately critical and affects the current version of both quicktime and itunes on Mac or Windows.

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Still running the qemu image (and downloaded another image from the freeoszoo while I was waiting for the installer.) Anyway… I’ve turned my attention to mythtv and since it’s the same version went to test if it was working well. Let’s see… for starters, since the local machine had seen a mysql upgrade (and the installer didn’t think I needed to run mysql at boot…) I had to do…

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In a small, trusted network you might be able to get away with weak passwords for file sharing for instance. What’s a weak password? Anything you might find in a dictionary. Most people don’t realize this, but there are programs designed to crack passwords. They’re designed to take a dictionary file and run through it trying every combination possible. It might take a while, but this kind of brute force attack can be VERY effective against a weak password.

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Ok – about 22 or 23 critical updates for Windows ME. I’m suspecting it’s never visited the Windows update site. While it’s going I make sure that the adware scanners and antivirus scanner get to pull updates from the web as well. It’s also time to scan for running network services that shouldn’t be running. It may be a dialup machine, but we don’t want UPNP listening over the connection.

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This may be the first in a series of several profiles looking at different ways to get published online. The internet has been a disruptive technology for so many industries. Book publishing is one of those. Used to you would submit a manuscript to publishers shopping around for someone to take your work. These days it can be as simple as going online and shopping between several publishers, uploading your book (or calendar, pictures or other content) and then letting them take care of the publishing details, selling, printing on demand and you haven’t had to deal with a rejection letter yet….

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There are lots of ways to get a remote desktop under linux, remote X, nxserver, vnc. One of the problems though is the most common configuration doesn’t let you connect to a running desktop session. There is a vnc component that let’s you do this and I’m using it right now. On the home network, sometimes I don’t want to be sitting at the desktop machine and would rather use the laptop while checking in on programs running on the desktop itself. But, being too lazy to go to the desktop it would be nice if there was a way I could run something remotely that would let me view that desktop… ahhh there is a way.

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