Keep Your Credit Cards Safe From Skimmers

This timely article is from PCWorld.com. It's kinda scary. There are very few good tips to prevent this criminal activity, so beware!

"Credit card skimming is a major threat to credit and debit card users. Here's what you need to know about this increasingly common form of financial fraud.

You're in a restaurant, enjoying a deep conversation. Peripherally, you see the waiter take your credit card and return a few minutes with a slip for you to sign. You think nothing of it until a few hours later when you receive a call from your bank: Someone is racking up serious debt on your credit card, mostly for electronics purchases. Is it you?

Skimming, a form of high-tech financial fraud, is on the rise worldwide. It relies on sophisticated data-reading electronics to copy the magnetic stripe information from your credit card or debit card. It can capture both your credit card number and your PIN. And it's happening not just at restaurants but at neighborhood gas pumps and ATM machines."

Read the entire article here

Hard Drive Diagnostic Rogue Program

A customer from my VT past wrote to say that her system had been infected by what I think is a new rogue program called "Hard Drive Diagnostic". I had not heard of it before. I see the folks at bleepingcomputer.com have heard of it and , no surprise to me, they say that the fix for it is Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, the free program contained in my base security recommended list of (free) programs. 

Should you get bitten by this rogue, I would recommend you start your system in Safe Mode and run a full scan using Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-hard-drive-diagnostic

Also see http://pcdocsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/my-recommended-security-baseline.html 

HOSTS File

The December MVPS HOSTS file is available today. This is a good day to fire up Spybot, update it, run immunize, and then run search and destroy. Afterwards, download the HOSTS file and install it and rest easy for the next month!

Speaking of AVG...............

This comes from technibble.com

"Yesterday AVG sent out an update that conflicts with 64bit Windows 7 systems. The conflict causes a “blue screen of death” when the system starts with the following message:

STOP: c0000135 The program can’t start because %hs is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

The makers of AVG have since removed the bad update (3292) and will be releasing a fix program in the coming days.

In order to repair the problem now, users can go into safemode and do a system restore back to a date before the update was downloaded. If users cannot get into safe mode, it is also possible to go into “Startup Repair”, “Repair Your Computer” and choose “View advanced options for system recovery and support” once it finishes scanning.

AVG has also posted additional repair details here if the above does not work."

If you found the previous two posts of interest, you should read this third part of the package. This article is more generic than the previous 2, but does include product specific information about the top products in each category (fee & free). Many of you may be interested in reading this. This is part 3 of 3 and again comes from pcworld.com.

Also of interest to me is how AVG, my old favorite free antivirus, has apparently fallen out of favor and not kept up with the competition. Also note while you read that both AVAST & AVIRA, like AVG Free, include annoying marketing messages trying to move you up to their fee-based professional versions.

Free vs. Fee: Free and Paid Antivirus Programs Compared

Top 5 Paid Antivirus for 2011

As a complement to yesterday's post about free antivirus programs, here is a similar list but this time of the fee-based antivirus programs. I try to avoid having to pay for software whenever I can, so I am no personal friend of any of these products, but I know there are plenty of people out there who like, and stay with, their fee-based programs. Keep in mind that for most, if not all, of these fee-based antivirus programs, the fee is an annual one. That's right, you have to pay every year to get the latest version. Check into each one if you are interested, to see exactly how their fee structure works. I am no expert in this.

As was yesterday's post, this review comes from pcworld.com

The specific article named above can be found here: http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/collection/5927/2011_paid_av.html 

Top 5 Free Antivirus for 2011

This is very interesting, perhaps especially to me. I am happy to see my recommended free antivirus program, Microsoft Security Essentials in what appears to be a virtual tie for second place. I am happy to see MSE ranked so favorably. It is, after all, a fairly new product. I have never thought that an antivirus program alone can do it all for you, and that is why I have a recommended security suite, and not just an antivirus program.

It will be worth your while to check out this web site and the results, provided by pcworld.com.

The review can be found here: http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/collection/5928/2011_free_av.html

If any of you reading this uses Avast, I would be interested in your comments about it. You can comment to this post below or write me at pcdoc@brpcdoc.com.

Christmas Food Court Surprise

Amazing! Enjoy

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank you for visiting my blog. I hope from time to time you find something you can use.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Is It Big Brother or Just an Algorithm?

This is a very interesting blog post from David Pogue of the NY Times. He wrote:

"A reader just wrote to complain. In Gmail, he wrote, “I have attached photo,” but then clicked Send without actually attaching anything. A message popped up: “You wrote ‘I have attached’ in your message, but there are no files attached. Send anyway?”

The reader was dismayed, saying he felt as if Big Brother was watching him.

My take is a little different. It’s this: “Wow, how smart of Google’s completely automated, robotic software algorithms to scan for the words ‘I have attached’ and flag me if I actually forget to attach the file! It saves me time and embarrassment, and of course isn’t anything at all like Big Brother because it’s a completely automated, robotic software algorithm!”

Man. This reminds me of the furor when Gmail first came out, offering 1,000 times the storage of rival Web e-mail services, but featuring little text ads at the side of the screen related to the contents of each message. There was the same Big Brother hysteria even though then, too, it was a completely automated, robotic software algorithm “reading” your mail.

Trust me, folks. If you’re worrying about Google reading your e-mail, you’d also better worry about Verizon and Comcast and Stop ‘n ‘Shop and Visa and your local library peeking into what you’re saying or watching or eating or buying or reading.

Now is a tad too late to worry about the privacy of your mundane life, methinks."

Visual tour: 25 years of Windows

This is interesting, particularly for someone like me who has lived through all of this.

"Twenty-five years ago, on Nov. 20, 1985, Microsoft introduced its first version of Windows to the world. Not many people outside the technical press or the tech industry took notice. Product launch events that cost hundreds of millions of dollars were still years away.

What's changed in Windows in the last 25 years? Plenty. In this image gallery, we take a look at the various faces of Windows over the past couple of decades and clue you in to what happened at every stage of the operating system's development.

1985: Windows 1.0

Screenshot courtesy of Microsoft.

Windows started in 1981 as a project called Interface Manager and experienced a series of delays getting out of the gate. When it was finally released in late 1985 as Windows 1.0, it made a ripple, not a splash. It had to be run on top of DOS, few applications were written for it, and application windows couldn't be overlapped (they had to be tiled).

Still, the OS allowed for multitasking of Windows apps (not DOS ones) and, even though few knew it at the time, it would eventually become the foundation for the Microsoft empire.

Windows 1.0 shipped with a handful of apps, including the Notepad text editor, a rudimentary calendar and the long-lived graphics painting program Paint. The operating system required MS-DOS Version 2.0, 256KB of memory and a graphics adapter. It could be run either from a hard disk or on two floppy disks running simultaneously -- in other words, you couldn't swap the disks in and out of a single drive."

Editorial comment: A hard drive was pretty rare then, and most people couldn't afford two diskette drives!

MORE......

Facebook e-mail?

Oh brother, here we go!


http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/11/15/gmail-beware-facebook-unveils-e-mail-service/

Windows XP: Looking back, looking forward

I subscribe to the Windows Secrets weekly newsletter. You can do so by donation. There is no fixed fee. I like the service and have over the past couple of years read many very worthwhile articles. The newsletter is always there in my Inbox folder on Thursday mornings.

This week's newsletter has an article titled Windows XP: Looking back, looking forward. I have provided a link to that article below. For those of you, like me, who still run XP on one or more machines, this is an outstanding reference article you will want to hang on to for the next 4 or more years.

As stated many times before, Windows XP will be supported by Microsoft through 2014, so there is no rush to migrate upwards if you don't have a need to do that.

Windows XP: Looking back, looking forward

MSRT

I just installed a half dozen or so Microsoft updates on my XP system, and saw that Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) was included in the list.

I have just clicked on START/RUN, keyed in MRT (not a typo), and clicked on OK to start the MSRT tool running. I noted that the window indicated the NOVEMBER 2010 version (up on top) and selected FULL SCAN, and it is now running and will finish while I am asleep.

This should be a routine by now for you all, I hope.

A Fall Guide: How to Pick Your Next Computer

Walt Mossberg's annual report from the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital web site. This may come in handy for those of you considering a Christmas gift for yourself or someone else.

A Fall Guide: How to Pick Your Next Computer

MSRT

A very observant and astute follower asked if Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool should be included in my security baseline.

Very good question. To be truthful, I think she was correct to ask and I frankly forgot about it.

MSRT, as has been posted here more than once, comes out once a month along with the usual monthly Microsoft updates. When that happens, I am all over it and run a FULL SCAN with the new MSRT. I have said I view it as insurance, and free at that. I also found out that Microsoft only runs a quick scan when the update is installed, so I figured why not run a full scan once a month just as extra added protection?

I don't know if I should include MSRT in the security baseline. I won't, for now at least, but I thank the reader who brought this to my attention, and I strongly encourage all of you to do as I do and run a monthly full scan.

My Recommended Security Baseline

From time to time I have and will refer to my security baseline. My security baseline is merely a list of programs I use (all free) and recommend for anyone to use to keep their systems secure. Over the next week, as time allows, I will make some comments and advice and instruction on each of these 7 products. If you are interested in making a change on your system(s) to this baseline or to some of it, please give me the chance to elaborate on these products over the course of the next week, and then make your decisions. This applies to YOU if you use Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7.

Remember, all of these products are FREE, but will do as good a job as any fee products you may use. I make that statement based on many years of experience.

1. Microsoft Security Essentials
2. Windows Firewall
3. MVPS HOSTS File
4. CCleaner
5. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
6. SuperAntiSpyware Free Edition
7. Spybot Search & Destroy

Something completely different

These aerial photos are so fabulous I just had to share them with you all:

http://justpaste.it/3ky

More housecleaning

The MVPS HOSTS file, October edition, was made available yesterday. You can get it at http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm.

Prior to installing it I recommend a monthly running of Spybot. When you start up Spybot remember to Update, Immunize, and then Search & Destroy. If you have been following my recommendations for a security baseline, then you should see this afterwards:

 

Although it might seem like a waste of time, I find it comforting to see that window once a month. My security baseline is different from most in my profession, but it works, and my system remains clean.

As a review, the reason for running Spybot only once a month, and just before installing the latest MVPS HOSTS file is that a part of Spybot's immunization process is to append thousands of extra lines to your existing HOSTS file. It is my belief that these are redundant and unnecessary as long as you install the MVPS HOSTS file. Remember, your HOSTS file is loaded into memory when you boot your machine, so you want an effective file but not one that is larger than necesary.

Security Firm Warns of Increase in Holiday Themed Malware Attacks

From maximumpc.com

"GFI Software, a security firm specializing in various software for small to medium-sized business, says to be on the lookout for Halloween-themed malware attacks.
The company's dedicated malware research center, GFI Labs, has been busy analyzing data from its ThreatNet monitoring system that retrieves real-time stats from tens of thousands of PCs running VIPRE antivirus software. What they found was an increase in the number of Trojans making the rounds in the days leading up to Halloween compared to last year."

More