I’ve written regularly about my selection of Windows Live OneCare as my anti-virus and anti-malware software application of choice. At the time of needing my own new application, I was able to purchase the software for use on three machines. At the time, I believe they were the only company to provide this purchase option. Many followed afterwards.

Microsoft has now released their Microsoft Security Essentails application that will be completely replacing Windows Live OneCare as their security application of choice.

The big change between the two application is that Microsoft Security Essentials will be offered as a free download. Compared to the price of OneCare. There are a few different functions that will not be included in the new application, but the core components of what you’re looking for in this kind of application will be there.

What anti-virus application do you use? What system do you have running on a daily basis? What applications do you use for some extra-curricular system scrubbing when it’s called for because of a variety of reasons?

I received an email today that was a phishing scam using the popular online payment website, PayPal. My Outlook client caught it as Junk Mail, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to show people how a legitimate “looking” email can really lead you to places you don’t want to go.

As you can see from the image above which is a screen capture from my email Inbox, everything looks normal and appropriate and legitimate right? However, if you hover your mouse over the links you’ll see that the link is actually going to direct you to a bogus website that’s been setup to collect your information. I’m sure if you went to the site (which I don’t recommend and which is why I’m not even typing the URL you’ll see) it would look just like the PayPal website too.

If you look at the code behind the email in your Inbox, which Outlook automatically displays for Junk Mail, we can see in the image below the bogus links much more clearly.

The lesson here is that before you go clicking on links in emails. Take a minute to hover over them before clicking and just make sure they’re going to take you to the place you’re expecting to go. Otherwise, you’ll end up in a place where you really don’t want to be.

I haven’t had a real virus or malware issue on my computer in quite awhile now. I think the key to this effort hasn’t been the brand of anti-virus or anti-spyware I use. Neither has it been based on the fact that I’m a PC or Mac user. Keeping yourself safe online is more of a mental task than software.

Custom Image by Jason Bean

You can follow these five steps to keep yourself safe on any system with any software installed.

1. Know Your Links: Too many times I think people just click on anything that’s blue and underlined in their browser. Take a minute and read where that link suggests it’s going. You can do this by hovering over the link and reading the information in the status bar. Notice the link shown in the status bar below. Not always a sure thing, but I rarely click on a link that doesn’t have a recognizable word, or just looks odd.
   

   Snagit of Firefox Status Bar

2. Don’t Install It: Before you go installing something cool you’ve just found, take a moment and think about whether or not you really need the application. Have you heard of it before you found it online? Was it recommended by someone you know and trust. My opinion is if it’s not familiar, it’s not installed.
3. Email Attachments: Rarely do I ever open or view email attachments I didn’t expect or ask for. This includes that cool video, music or PowerPoint presentation you got from your Uncle Roy. I delete almost immediately.
4. False “Helpful” Warnings: Sometimes you’ll get what appears to be a helpful message letting you know your system may be infected. The problem is that the helpful message is wanting you to click on it to install malware on your system. Be familiar with your own software, whatever you’re using and don’t click on anything that’s not familiar to you. Including the “Close” buttons or other items. When in doubt, you can use ALT+F4 to close active windows or the Windows Task Manager.
5. Forget Forwarding: Perhaps not an immediate threat to the security of your system, forwarding emails over and over is just a problem that builds upon itself. If you wouldn’t pick up the phone to tell someone about what you just saw on email, don’t forward it to someone. Too good to be true? Delete it! For one you’re spreading useless information. More importantly you’re helping to harvest active email addresses for spammers. If you must forward something, use the BCC: field and remove everyone’s email addresses from the body.

I must be completely out of touch with computers. Apparently I have absolutely no clue about the big Conficker virus that’s been all over the news. I’ve seen it in headlines, but I never really heard many details about it so I didn’t even know it was a virus I needed to worry about until yesterday.

Back Image Source: www.sxc.hu

The question is did I need to be worried?

Conficker.C began using a new algorithm on Wednesday to look for instructions from its creator, prompting speculation that it might be readying for an attack. According to security experts, however, the worm has been quiet so far.

Am I just enjoying a false sense of security in all of this or is my ignorance my bliss? Honestly I haven’t had a serious malware or virus infection in quite some time. I can’t even remember the last time I spent any real amount of effort cleaning up from an infection or having to rebuild a system due to a virus.

I’m not the only one blissful in my ignorance either it appears. I love David Coursey’s humorous outlook on the whole Conficker hoopla:

The Conficker Worm is like the Paris Hilton of computer security: Famous solely for being famous. Neither has actually ever done anything of note. But, at least Paris has a sense of humor about her celebrity. Conficker just wastes people’s time.

Now that’s funny folks. What’s been your experience? Have you been impacted or bothered really at all, that is except for all the news alerts and blips about it in your feed readers?

Source: Conficker Worm Is Much Ado About Nothing, Conficker May Be More Widespread Than Previously Thought

One of the challenges experienced today was to move all the photos around on my family’s PC and aggregate them on a single partitioned drive located on the secondary hard drive in the system. For some reason I could never really get the access to the photos I wanted. I could see them, but couldn’t move copies of them to my local laptop for editing or use as I desired.

After I moved all of the photos and images to the new drive I couldn’t get my local machine mapped to the new drive so I could access the photos as I had hoped. The problem was that I kept getting an error that I couldn’t connect to the share because there was already a connection made using the same login.  I couldn’t find the login for anything thought, not sure what was going on.

Snagit of Mapping Network Drive in Windows XP OS

Eventually I did what I end up always trying in events like this. Reboot. I did a full shut-down and reboot of the desktop computer along with a full shut-down and reboot of my laptop as well. Figuring this would close any existing connections using a login I was using, I would be good to go after the reboot.

I was right. Everything is good now.

In a recent post I asked what you readers chose as your preferred security and maintenance tools. These are the applications you consider indispensable when trying to keep your systems in top running shape and secure from the variety of potential attacks and intrusions from nefarious entities found on the intarwebs!

Here’s my list of applications that I used even today as I was cleaning up my family’s desktop PC.

CCleaner which is short for “CRAP” Cleaner. It does a great job of finding all the hidden pieces of installed applications that sometimes don’t get removed with the program’s default uninstall function.

Revo Uninstaller is very similar to CCleaner, but I choose to take advantage of both as an option in case one just won’t get rid of something. I usually run one, followed by the other to just insure that there are non remnants of anything I’m wanting to make sure I get rid of in the end.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free is a great tool for finding any malware, trojans, hijack apps and other annoying little critters that love getting into our systems and mucking everything up.

Windows Live OneCare has been my preferred option for real-time antivirus and malware protection on my systems and others. Recent news that Microsoft will be nixing their OneCare product may lead me to be looking for a replacement and free alternative in the future. Microsoft will be releasing a free option of their own, but I’ll wait and see how it looks before making a choice. I’m interested in what free antivirus applications you all recommend.

Belarc Advisor isn’t a tool to remove much of anything, but it provides a great resource for quickly cataloging and finding out what’s on your system and how you stand on a variety of security fronts.

Images: Various logos from application pages downloaded

In my last post I shared an extremely helpful, but very low-tech tool I use to help keep the various computers I manage running in tip-top-shape. I regularly serve as “tech support” for a variety of friends and family members and I have a thumb drive that I carry with me with a variety of little apps on it to help clean-up and service those computers.

Image: Stock photo from Stock Photo Exchange

Before I share my list of tools with you though, I’m very interested to see what you all are using in your own software toolboxes. What apps do you use for anti-virus, spyware, registry clean-up, defragging? We’ll not limit ourselves to just those items either. Any tool you use to help service computers or keep them running smoothly, I’m interested in hearing about it.

SSH is one communication protocol that is used to access remote systems all the time. Short for “Secure Shell”, SSH provides a secure channel for data exchange, unlike Telnet and other insecure remote shells. Telnet, e.g., transmits all data including passwords in plain text.

For a system A to connect to a remote system B through SSH, A needs a SSH client (like PuTTY for Windows) and B needs a SSHD server running all the time so as to accept incoming connections.

SSH is a proprietary software offered by SSH Communications Security, and as an alternative the open source version OpenSSH is being widely used. On all Unix-based OSs, the OpenSSH SSHD server is installed by default during the installation of the operating system. On Windows, however, it is not the case.

You can install it on top of Cygwin very easily. You will need administrator access with a password set for the account. When you run the Cygwin setup to download or install various packages, select openssh which will select all the other packages it requires.

Once you complete the install, to configure SSHD run $ ssh-host-config –y from the terminal. This will automatically answer ‘yes’ for the yes/no questions. Give an appropriate password that follows your system rules if an sshd_server is being created or ignore this step. Specify the value of the environment variable CYGWIN as “ntsec tty” for WinXP and Vista and “binmode ntsec tty” for Windows 2003 Server (without quotes). At the end of this process, the sshd service will have automatically started and placed itself among the Windows startup list.

If you have any problems, try following this article for WinXP and Vista and this one for Windows 2003 Server or drop me a message.

Every now and then a popular website gets hacked and tons of user passwords are published for everyone to see. On one side, it can potentially lead to huge losses to the users whose passwords have been compromised. On the other, security analysts use the data to gain various insights.

In one such recent attack, Robert Graham, the CEO of Errata Security, came to a few startling conclusions based on the passwords published showing what should not be your password:

• 16% of passwords matched a person’s first name
• 14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard
• 4% are variations of the word “password”
• 5% of passwords are pop-culture references
• 4% of passwords appear to reference things nearby
• 3% of passwords are “emo” words
• 3% are “don’t care” words
• 1.3% are passwords people saw in movies/TV
• 1% are sports related

You can read the complete report here.

Password management is a big hassle that every Internet user has to deal with today. Apart from the regular ones that I use, I try out new products and services all the time and have over 50 different accounts as I speak. So I use a password management software called KeePass, which is open source. In the past, Jesse suggested several others like Billeo, Vidoop and Passpack. These softwares usually are also capable of generating strong passwords or you can use an online service like the Strong Password Generator to generate a password for you.

The most basic rule is to use a long combination of small and capital letters, numbers and symbols. Read this Microsoft Security article about how to create and use strong passwords.

There are a lot of utilities that can be used to clean a computer. These do something more than the usual “Disk Cleanup” ($ cleanmgr), are easy to use with custom features and are faster too. Cleaning up your computer can improve its performance and ensure greater privacy. For a while now, I have been using Piriform’s CCleaner. It is one of the most comprehensive utilities of its kind.

CCleaner’s primary feature is the Cleaner. First, it will analyze the system, fetch the files that it is going to delete from the recycle bin, browser caches, other application caches, and many other obscure locations. The user can choose which areas to scan for and which to leave alone. Then the files can be deleted using any of the four secure file deletion options, but be warned that the greater the number of passes the fewer the chances of recovery if needed. There are many other customizations that can be made, like specifying the files and folders to be deleted and those to be excluded (apart from the usual set), the cookies to be preserved, and running from the command line.

CCleaner also has a registry cleaner than cleans the registry for any old or unclean or deleted entries. I think this feature can be made more robust. Be sure to save the registry before editing it.

Two other tools that come along are the “Uninstall” and “Startup” tools. The former can be used to uninstall programs. It is faster than the conventional “Add or Remove Programs” in loading the programs and also loads most programs unlike the regular option. The “Startup” tool can be used to disable or delete various startup processes, equivalent to the options provides by msconfig.

One other (unnecessary) feature I like about CCleaner is the way it displays the OS and the processor details when opened.

CCleaner is a regularly updated free software with new versions released every now and then. Download the latest version from the official CCleaner website. It is hardly 3 MB.

Image Source: CCleaner on my PC.