Securing your Windows Machines
Comments OffAfter a Long day at work, you sometimes feel like there isn’t much you want to talk about. Then this idea comes to me? Why do people blog and why do people talk about security?
I’ve come to realize something, I’m not one who was grew up understanding bits from bytes. I grew up as any family does fighting with my siblings.
Having been blogging the past few years, it seems like only yesterday that I started blogging. Cliche I know but still very much true. Most blogs do what they know, I aim to learn and teach each day I blog. Like days like this when the world is pretty much quite and the remnants of the conficker worm dies to a rumble.
After a day long battle with my wife’s system, I grow to wonder if there is something I should do differently with how to prevent Viruses and Worms on her system. So I’ve groomed my Knowledge base and come up with 5 good points when it comes to locking down your Windows Machines:
Rogue Fake Codecs on the Rise
Comments OffPanda Labs has been talking about Adware/VideoPlay and they are seeing a lot of variants on this. They even play a game, find the difference in the installation screen:
Now as you can see this look to be the same agreement in all those difference installation. Some things to consider Never install any software from a website that you don’t know Nothing about about.
Panda Labs also talks about these new variants in regards to what they do:
This file spreads by making copies of itself in the removable drives and it also creates an autorun.inf in order to be run when they are accessed. This file collects the data stored in the browsers, such as cookies, passwords, profiles, email accounts, etc, and connects to a remote address to send the information.
[Via Panda Labs Blog]
How to disable autorun the easy way!!!
Comments OffI read a report from Cnet about USB devices spreading Virus and I will quote:
The bad guys are intentionally developing new flavors of malware designed to propagate through USB devices,” said Gunter Ollmann, chief security strategist for IBM’s ISS security division. “They are today’s floppy drives.”
An infected computer can spread a virus to a clean USB thumb drive that is inserted. That USB drive will then be spreading the virus onto other computers if the operating system on those machines has an AutoRun-type feature enabled. The AutoRun function in Windows launches installers and other programs automatically when a flash drive or CD is inserted. The Mac has an equivalent function, according to Ollmann.[Via Cnet]
In order to disable “autorun“, which in Vista is called Autoplay. In order to disable Autoplay from starting when you insert media into your computer here is how you do it:
You will need to be Logged in as Administrator before this can be done:
Next click start and type “Autoplay” without quotes. It will bring up a screen but all you have to worry about is this:
