Free Technology Zone

WARNING: Bogus Alert!

Just recently I noticed something very interesting on my wife’s laptop.  I noticed it because I’m normally the one who install her anti-virus (AV) and other programs.  This one was obvious because there appeared to be another AV program reporting that laptop is being attacked or hacked and that I must purchase it in order to protect the computer from this attack!

The bogus AV is called Spyware Guard 2009.  This one is categorized as a parasite–meaning that it is one heck of a program to remove from your computer.  It is one destructive and nasty parasite because it does the following:

• Prevents you from going to the Internet
• screws up the user profile…meaning that if you log out then login, it will tell you that your user profile is missing; effectively you can’t get back to your desktop

It does more, but I didn’t wait too long to find out.

Most users would be easily scammed and overwhelmed by this, but fortunately I’m not most users.  Even then, it was one heck of a parasite to remove.  How did I do it?

I did a lot of searches on the Internet (using another computer).  Most solutions I found provided free scans to find the problem but wanted me to pay to remove.  However, I found a solution that allowed me to scan an remove.   It is called Malwarebyte’s Anti-malware.

It allowed me to scan and identify registry entries and files that were part of this parasite.  Then it gave me the option to remove them.  It couldn’t remove about 5 of them, even after a couple of attempts.  I knew then that I had a relatively new or different strain.

Fortunately, MalwareByte Anti-Malware clearly identified which ones it couldn’t remove.  I tried removing them in Windows safe mode, with no luck–system reports that they cannot be deleted.

As a last resort, I booted using ERD Commander and deleted the bad files and registry entries.  And FINALLY got rid of that parasite.

The last thing I did was removed the administrative rights of my wife’s account.  This should help prevent any future major infection.

I hope this is helpful to others who read this.

I’ve been using the BlueCoat K9 Web Protection product for some time now.  It’s purpose is to help keep you or your kids from going to inappropriate web sites.  The degree of inapropiateness you disallow is dictated by how you configure the filter and what site categories you allow.

Note that if you have kids, this is a perfect companion for your home computer.  The product is free; all you have to do is register to get your free license key.  Download the  product here:

• http://bluecoat.com/products/k9web

As you may know your standard anti-virus (AV) software cannot generally protect you from malicious websites.  Although the big names in the AV market have implemented such features in the past, those solutions have gotten so bloated that they pretty much make your computer run like a snail.  That is why I’ve pretty much have given up on most of those solutions and have used a more lightweight solution from AVAST!.  AVG provides a lightweight solution as well, and they’ve recently made public their link scanner–called AVG Linkscanner.

This linkscanner is supposed to protect you from malicious web sites by blocking or informing you of a site’s reputation before you even go there.

You can get an online demo of  AVG Linkscanner here:

• http://linkscanner.avg.com

I’ve installed it at home.  It’s free; let’s see how it does.

Your Anti-Virus (AV) software starting to bog down your computer?  I’ve seen and have experienced this personally.  What did I do?  I uninstalled my AV software and installed something more lightweight like avast! Home Edition. 

Give it a try, I’ve been using it, and I have been very happy with its performance.

One of the worst things that can happen to you is to lose a flash drive.  The one thing that can is even worst than that is if teh flash drive has confidential information.

Enter TrueCrypt!

TrueCrypt is an encryption product that will allow you to create a secure file which you can access like a drive (e.g. drive G:, M:, or whatever you choose it to be).  In order to mount it like a drive you need to supply a passphrase–which you setup when you build a TrueCrypt file volume.

If you save the TrueCrypt file on a USB flash drive and access it like a drive, you can store your confidential files there.

If you ever lose this flash drive, no one can access the confidential data you have in the TrueCrypt file because they are encrypted.  That solves your problem.  The only thing you need to make sure you do now is make backups of your data so you can recover them should you lose your flash drive; and you won’t have to worry about others seeing your confidential files!