Spring is Coming Time to Get That Computer Cleaned

Spring is just around the corner. We'll be opening the windows and letting in fresh air. Winter has played havoc on our homes, lots of dust collects everywhere, especially in your computer tower.

The image above demonstrates the accumulation of months of case fans sucking in dust and dirt from our homes. Our computers need to breathe. If the cpu fan becomes clogged it can no longer keep the computer at a safe operating temperature which can lead to system failure.

Regular computer system maintenance is a must for a longer life for your computer.

Vista your local computer shop today so your computer will work tomorrow.

Secure your e-mail

We all use anti-virus and anti-spyware programs to help fight online threats but what about those we willfully let in with our e-mail clients. Here are a few tips you can use to make incoming and outgoing e-mail a little safer.

1. Don't allow your e-mail client to completely render HTML e-mails.
It is much safer to have your e-mail client render your incoming e-mails with limited HTML or better yet as plain text. Allowing full HTML rendering of your e-mail leaves you open as a valid recipient of spam or the risk of getting successfully phished by some malicious security cracker or identity thief.

2. Avoid free e-mail services.
Your POP3 account from your ISP is more secure than free e-mail services such as YahooMail, GMail and other free e-mail providers. ISP's usually require encryption to send and recieve e-mail and they do not sell or share your information.

3. Don't Access your e-mail account from an unsecured network.
We all want to check e-mail or banking while we're away on vacation. Often internet cafe's and free wireless access points are unsecure leaving your data open to the public.

4. Safe guard your address book users.
Address books are handy to send e-mail to all your friends and family with a simple click, however many trojans are designed to use your stored address book to send malicious code to all your users.

5. Use BBC when sending e-mail to multiple recipients.
Using BBC when sending e-mail to everyone in your address book ensures that each
user sees only his or her own e-mail address. Other recipients e-mail addresses are
hidden.

What is the Safest P2P Program?

Morning Folks,

It amazes me how many people ask this question and others much like it. P2P programs don't give you viruses and spyware, the files you download do. Everyone wants something for nothing.

Now I'm not saying all p2p users are sending out viruses and spyware, that just wouldn't be true.
And p2p programs are nice for sharing legitimate files with others, however there will always be someone writing bad code just because they can.

I could just say go buy the software you need but of course I'm not here to judge anyone. To each his/her own so I'll tell you how to be a little safer.

Make sure the anti-virus your using can scan incoming files. If it can't get a new one. Set the scanner to scan all incoming files from p2p. Avast anti-virus has this option and it works well.

Compare file sizes.. You want a program and its 50mb on the manufacturer's site, you look it up in your p2p program and its 52.6mb, does that tell you any thing?

You virus scanner warns you about a possible virus and you contiune any way... This is plain dumb. If any scanner flags a file its most likley infected.

What if your not using a p2p program but instead use a torrent client built into your browser?
99.9% of Adult sites, Warez Sites, and Torrent Sites have either been hijacked or purposly infect your machine.

If you must surf these sites set your browser to block all pop's ups, disable all scripting, and disable iframes. While your surfing may be somewhat limited you will be much safer and those sites that won't load at all.... well your better off.

Users give these hijackers the ability to spread more and more infections. Maybe this will help some of you avoide that.

Safer Internet Surfing

Whew busy busy busy, to many machines infected with spyware, rouge anti-virus and pop-ups. Many of you are probably already aware that several browsers have the ability to allow surfing the Internet without add-on's.

Internet Explorer and Firefox both offer safer browsing without add-on's. Add-on's are those lil programs and scripts that allow us to see and hear the cool stuff in web pages.

While we all love the bells and whistles online they are becoming increasingly dangerous to our computers. It is estimated that web site infections by rouge anti-virus and trojans via active x controls are rising daily.

Good Luck and Safe Surfing.

Internet Explorer Causes Your Computer to Restart

The Problem

Interesting job I had in the shop today. Windows XP Home sp2 and Internet Explorer 7 on an old hp. The computer would restart everytime Internet Explorer was opened. It never even fully loaded. The computer has AVG 8 free edition so my first thought was a Windows issue. But I have a system diagnostic routine I follow on every machine so using my own security tools, Malwarebytes anti-malware and avast anti-virus I find that 309 files are infected.

Internet Explorer had 4 toolbars installed. Several instances of Vundo, and several generic trojans.

The Fix
Begin by removing all toolbars in add/remove. There is no telling which one is casuing the issue, you can always install the one you really want later.

Download and run Malwarebyte Anti-Malware Here
Let it remove what it can.

Disable or remove any anti-virus software you have installed
Download and install Avast Anti-Virus Here
On installation schedule a boot time scan.
When asked to reboot Cancel.
Open Avast and update it. When the update is complete restart your computer.
Follow the scan as it will ask for your permission on the action for each infection found.

When the scan is finished and the computer has been cleaned it will boot to Windows.
Run a final full scan of both programs to be sure you found all infected files.

Hope this helps some of you :)