Friday, December 14, 2012

Friday, December 14, 2012

A very, very sad day for humankind.

RIP innocents, and may your families, somehow, find some strength to get them through to tomorrow.

U.S. banks warned of cyberattack on accounts

Ain't this just grand? What a wonderful state of affairs. Perhaps totally unrelated, very annoying nonetheless, my bank doesn't even allow special characters in account passwords. As I say, perhaps unrelated to the topic at hand, PLEASE do use the most complex password for your important accounts, like your bank and credit card accounts. Use a mixture of lower and upper case letters, numbers, AND special characters, and do it now.

Also, check your own security suite. If you are not well-protected, go ahead and review my recommendations, and whatever else you do, before running any anti-malware tool be sure it is updated to include all known malware. My recommendations can be found here: Security Baseline Revisited
  
So here's the subject story:

"The U.S. financial services industry has issued a warning that a Russian cyber-gangster is preparing to rob American banks and their customers of millions of dollars.

In addition, the computer security firm McAfee has reported that the cyber-criminal, who calls himself “Thief-in-Law,” already has infected the hundreds of computers of unwitting American customers in preparation to steal their bank account data."

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

December Updates

I just downloaded and installed 12 Microsoft updates. That is not too bad for a once a month update, considering all of the software I have on this Windows 7 machine. I really love my new ZT (from Costco) desktop computer.

While downloading the 12 updates I noticed the 12th one was Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT or MRT as it is known).

So after rebooing I did a START/RUN/MRT OK and chose the full scan, as I do every month. It is running now as I write this. I don't think MRT has ever found a problem on any of my machines, but I still run it every month.

An ounce of prevention, I guess.

Enjoy this Christmas season as best as one can under the circumstances of our national condition.