Online Computer Tips Monthly Newsletter - November 2008
Latest Virus/Security Alerts:
Credit card account statement email virus
There is an email virus going around that claims to have information about your credit card statement and trys to trick you into opening an attachment that contains a virus. The attachment name will most likely be statement.zip and contain a Microsoft Word document which is actually an executable file with the virus in it.
The body of the email will look similar to the following.
Dear Valued Customer:
ID: - your email address -
As requested, we are sending you this account statement with information on the transactions carried out with your credit card between 1/1/2008 and 8/1/2008.
If you get an email similar to this you should delete it right away and empty it from your trash.
October's Poll Results:
Do you prefer to shop online or in the store?
Online
- 35%
In the store
Tip of the Month:
Trend Micro Tools and Services
Trend Micro has an effective line of antivirus and firewall software but they also offer a collection of free tools that you can use to help protect your system from internet threats. The tools can be downloaded from their website and are easy to use. Here is a listing of the tools they offer that you can download.
HouseCall is a free Web-based tool designed to scan your PC for a wide range of Internet security threats including viruses, worms, Trojans, and spyware. It also detects system vulnerabilities.
Trend Micro eMail ID is a free browser plug-in that helps you identify legitimate email messages in your inbox. It uses a two-step check to verify the authenticity of messages in your email.
TrendProtect is a free browser plug-in that helps you avoid Web pages with unwanted content and hidden threats. TrendProtect rates the current page and pages listed in Google, MSN, and Yahoo search results.
HijackThis is a free utility that generates an in-depth report of registry and file settings from your computer. In addition to its scan and remove capability HijackThis comes with several tools useful in manually removing malware from a computer.
Transaction Guard is free software that protects you against spyware while performing sensitive online tasks on a public computer, like Internet banking or other financial transactions.
Check out the Trend Micro tools and download them here.
Hot Product of the Month: Kingston 32GB USB Flash Drive
OCT Review:
The Kingston DataTraveler 150 USB Flash drive is big news in mobile storage. With a capacity of 32GB, it lets you store more digital files than ever before on one drive. Take your files and music with you wherever you go with this large capacity flash drive with an affordable price.
Advertisement:
Important Windows and Office patches:
Microsoft Security TechCenter
The Security TechCenter provides links to technical bulletins, advisories, updates, tools, and prescriptive guidance designed to help IT pros keep Microsoft servers, desktops, and applications up to date and secure. On the site you can search for security bulletins and view security advisories as well as sign up for technical security notifications.
Since this is an election month you may want to get up to par with your presidential knowledge and check out the History of the US Presidents website.
Readers Question of the Month:
How to keep new computer running smoothly
Derick writes in with a Windows question
Question: No major problem. I'd just got my first computer. Any advise that you can give will be helpfull to keep my computer perfoming at its best.Thank you
Answer: There are a few things you can do to keep your computer optimized. First of all don't install unnecessary software that you will never use. The more you install, the slower computer seem to run. Next is to keep your hard drive defragged. Windows has a built in disk defragmenter but 3rd party tools such as Diskkeeper do a much better job. Vista is supposed to defrag on its own but I don't really have faith in it.
You should also keep your computer clean by getting rid of temp files and registry entries that are no good. Ccleaner is a free and very effective software product you can use whenever you want to do a cleaning.
You can also keep your computer running faster by disabling any programs that start with your computer that don't need to be running in the background. You can use msconfig to take care of that.
Its also a good idea to do regular virus and spyware scans to avoid these infections slowing your computer down and causing other problems.
Within hours of settling the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, spam seen worldwide began incorporating the name and image of Barack Obama, according to various security vendors. The U.K.'s Sophos reported 60 percent of all spam seen by the lab on Wednesday was in some way Obama related.
One piece of spam alleges to contain a link to video of Obama's acceptance speech. If you follow the video link within the e-mail message you will be taken to a Web page where you'll be asked to update your Adobe Flash Player with a file, adobe_flash9.exe, first. This is not an official Adobe update file and downloading this file may in turn infect your computer with a Trojan.
Sophos named the Trojan Mal/Behav-027. F-Secure named it W32/Papras.CL. Sunbelt Software also has a blog about this particular piece of spam.
Meanwhile, Websense is reporting a separate threat. An e-mail appears to be an interview with the new president elect. The e-mail features embedded links to a video site that attempts to install a file, BarackObama.exe. Downloading this file may infect your computer with a Trojan.
