Cyberwise, a dangerous week.

Ya, I know…I’ve been bad about posting…

Before saying anything else, if you have an iPhone, connect to iTunes ASAP and get the new patch! It is VERY critical! I mean having your phone taken over kinda critical.

On top of that Adobe is having a lot of issue, both with Acrobat and Flash. If you haven’t yet, head over to adobe and get the new version of Flash!

Been doing a lot of charity work this week:

A friend who had to move in with the rest of his family, due to the economy, is now having to use his family’s computer. The poor thing was so infected it would shut down every 3 mins. They never activated the McAfee (not that I recommend the performance sucking product, but you need some AV program and MS updates.) anti virus that came with the HP computer 4 years ago! It was still running XP SP1, no updates, ever!! They apparently couldn’t handle my suggestion of a full erase are rebuild because of no backups (not exactly a surprise). I did manage to get the viruses off (Not seeing any rootkits but who can be sure?). First I booted from a rescue kit CD, scanned with 4 different virus packages, then reset the master boot record. Then I booted from an Ultimate Boot CD and did an Avira scan. Installed Avira free edition, a copy of Windows Defender and 18 hrs later his system was back up.

Next, another friend had his computer screwed up by the local ISP and Microsoft. All he wanted was to get off MSN and use his local ISP’s email address. Why MS/ISP throught they needed to un-install MSN I have no idea (He might need to look at old email, right?). Well they screwed up the uninstall, then said “oh your windows is screwed up, you better get a technician to fix this”. The guy is a retired engineer on a fixed income. What a bunch of Jerks.

By the time he called me explorer (not IE) was complete broken and would error if you tried to open “my computer”, or ever tried to open “Control Panel”.

I downloaded MS uninstaller, tried to remove what was left of MSN, still broken.
I then grabbed the Advanced Unistaller Pro 9, 30 day trial and at least got the MSN systems off of there.
I tried installing IE8 (I have him on Firefox anyway, so no issue except when updating windows.). No joy.
Re-installed SP3, still nothing.
I finally had to do a rollback 2 weeks, then re-install the latest program and that got it going again. I also re-installed MSN so he could get to his old email.
Put his new email on Outlook and he is up and running again.
Why MS couldn’t have done this I have no idea.

Anyway needless to say I made nothing off these efforts this week except a warm feeling, not a bad payment.

In the world in general; there were at least two “Denial of Service” attacks from a bunch of botnets which are usually unpatched computers. One was on twitter (maybe the Iranian government betting back for the broadcast of the election?), the other was on a business ISP.

One of the reasons I do a lot of charity work is becuase even people who can’t pay need to have security computers that aren’t part of a botnet army. One more up to date secured computer is one not causing DoS attacks.

Also there is no was to look for a job without a computer.

ISPs are getting better at detecting and disconnecting infected subscribers from thier networks.

…and no apple users, you can’t be smug! Did you read the opener on this post, iPhones are hacked, OS X has a current JAVA hack, get those patches up do date!

A great way to keep up do date is install Securia PSI, it scans your system an advises you when updates are available.

Maybe these hacks have something to do with Darkhat and Defcon, two hacker conventions in the last couple weeks but it could have just been timing.

Who knows? Just keep your patches up to date!