Posts Tagged ‘virus’

No, you’re not infected…

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous is concerned about a very scary looking website. I attempt to calm the waters.

I used Yahoo to search for something and was sent immediately to the following [redacted] site. I believe my Mac was invaded and don’t know what to do!

First, relax. Your Mac wasn’t invaded, infected, compromised, co-opted, or conquered. If you’d clicked through a few of those dire pop-up warnings you might have been as amused as I was to see a phony Windows Security Alert appear on a Macintosh. What you’ve encountered is termed “scareware”—a scam that attempts to frighten those confronted with these pages into downloading a hunk of software that will allegedly deal with the problem.

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Tags: identity protection, privacy, security, tips & tricks, trojan, virus, worm
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ComboFix (Windows)

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

ComboFix is just as spartan as the screenshot here makes it look. You download ComboFix, run it, and it takes care of the rest. The basic ComboFix process looks like this: It backs up your registry, checks to see if you have Windows Recovery Console installed, and then it goes to town on your system scanning away through 40+ stages. When it’s done, ComboFix spits out a log file and lists all the malware it found, which ones it was able to remove, and which ones you’ll have to use your Google-fu to look up how to remove manually. It isn’t fancy, but it gets the job done and gives you a detailed report at the end to take to security forums for help if you need it.

Tags: security, software, trojan, virus, windows, worm
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Panda Cloud Antivirus is a Lightweight, Always-Updated Virus Killer

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

Windows only: Panda Cloud Antivirus uses the power of cloud computing to scan and eliminate viruses from your PC that can identify new malware in almost real time.

Traditional anti-virus applications simply download an update from the servers on a periodic basis to keep your virus definitions scanning for the latest viruses—Cloud Antivirus uses their cloud system to do the work of classifying and scanning for new viruses, and is constantly updated with the latest virus information based on information from every other PC running the software.

The client is lightweight, taking a mere 16mb of RAM on our test system—and while it caches a copy of the definitions for offline use, it doesn’t seem to take much drive space either. We’ve not had a chance to test the software against real malware—in our testing it quickly found and eliminated a bunch of spy cookies, but it’s refreshing to see new innovation in the boring world of virus killing.

Panda Cloud Antivirus is a free download for 32-bit Windows only, and according to CNET will stay free for personal use even after it is released from beta. For more, check out the five best malware removal tools, and the five best antivirus applications.

Tags: microsoft, privacy, software, trojan, virus, windows, worm
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Information about Conficker

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

Here’s an illustration of how the Conficker worm works

Conficker is a collection of related malware strains typically described as a worm due to its ability to self-propagate through a network.  In other words, in contrast to a typical virus, Conficker does not necessarily need a user to do anything such as click on an infected file to compromise a system.  There are currently three known variants of Conficker (also called Downadup by some anti-malware vendors) and each of them can propagate through a number of mechanisms, the most common is by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows.  This vulnerability can be fixed by applying a patch from Microsoft that was released last November (link below).

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Tags: conficker, email, microsoft, news, trojan, updates, virus, windows, worm
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