With all the media hype about conficker, I thought you might like a good collection of trustworthy resources. Beware of websites that have recently registered as “conficker help.” In fact, just avoid them all together. There’s also reports of malicious software masquerading as detection and cleaning tools for Conficker-infected computers, as well as spam offering the same.
There’s no need to try and figure out what’s safe or real and what has more sinister plans in mind. The good folks at dshield.org have been keeping an updated list of third party information on conficker. Here you can find plenty of free conficker detection and removal tools, general information and the microsoft patch. That should help keep you updated, safe and informed.
I’ve also found out about one other real neat way of detecting it, but it’s for more advanced users, so I’m going to make a seperate post about it.
I’m going to post some helpful info about conficker in a bit. I’m at work right now and can’t. Will do it at lunch… Some real good and timely resources. Be sure to check back
An interesting post today, on the Internet Storm Center, reminds us to look over our router logs. Also, disable remote administration of the router, unless it’s absolutely necessary.
You can see what happens when someone guesses an easy password and gets into a router, and the lsessons learned, here.
The most excellent packet sniffing tool, formerly known as etheral, now known as wireshark has recently been updated to ver 1.0.6 This is one of those programs that I find hard to write up. All I can say is, I love it. When I was first learning about network traffic, I tried out etheral. I loved being able to see that raw network traffic. I was amazed at the shear amount of traffic on my LAN. It also stirred my interest in what all these protocols were.
Soon I was using it to uncover malware and where they were phoneing home to. I also used it to get ip addresses of people on IRC when they DCC to me. And just recently I used it at work. Someone forgot their e-mail password and they needed it to get on their web mail. I just fired up wireshark and the launched Outlook. Then I just looked through the log and found to communication to the POP server, and there was the user name and password. Set it up with a wifi card and you can capture some intresting packets.
Then there is Sharkfest, June 15th – 18th at Stanford University which I can only dream of going to.
It was 20 years ago Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Not quite 20 years to the day, but close enough. In this Ted talk, Tim talks about what is the next step in the evolution of the World Wide Web.
Seeing how I’m now running Word Press, it only makes sense that I would tell you about Word Press TV. If you are running Word Press, or are just thinking about using it, you owe it to yourself to give this site a look.
Even though it’s only been up for maybe 2 months, there’s a lot of great content. There’s plenty of How-To videos, for beginners to advanced users. There’s videos about administration, set-up, widgets, publishing, media, plugins, themes, custom design, and more. There is also a section of videos from Word Camp.
I wanted to write about Word Press TV when it first went live, but I haven’t actully spent any amount of time on it, untill recently. Most of them are using vimeo to host their videos, so the quality is execlent. Theses aren’t some junky, pixalated Youtube videos. They are high quality and when I viewed them with HD turned on, the screen captures of in the how-to videos was perfect and crisp and easy to read the all the text in the videos. Even when not in full screen or HD you can read them easily. If only everyone made instructional videos at this quality. Check out the example below.
Getting set up with the WP e-Commerce plugin: settings and configuration
I got my hosting and name servers all straightened out now. You will notice the address bar no longer just says http://pccybertek.com for all the posts and links. We now resolve to a complete address for each article making it easier to share or bookmark any page.
I also fixed the settings so anyone can leave a comment now. When I switched this blog over to Word Press not long ago, I never adjusted the settings so anyone coule leave a comment. No longer will you have to create an account to leave a comment. If you would like to create a comment, you are more than welcome to, but it’s no longer required.
A while back someone brought me a dead laptop and wanted the data retrived. To make a long story short, I copied all the files needed, to an external usb hard drive, and gave both back to the client. Recently she got a new laptop, with Vista, and it wouldn’t see the usb hard drive with all the backed up files and music. So last night I copied all the files to the respective folders. The original files came from a laptop running XP so the My Documents aren’t layed out quite the same. However, it’s easy enough to match them up, you just can’t copy and paste the whole tree. Anyways, I copied all the iTunes files. Then I opended iTunes and found the option where you can import a directory to the iTunes library. So I selected the folder where the backed up iTunes songs had been copied, When I logged into iTunes and tried to play the songs, they played just fine. When I was backing them up, I found all these complicated answers on the internet, but just so you know, I didn’t need to export the files or the library or anything. Just copied the files. Just thought I’d pass that on.
Apple has also announced that they will now offer 3 tiers of song priceing, as well as offerning all songs DRM free. Once they signed the deal with the record companies, to allow them to sell their music with out DRM or Digital Rights Management, that which limits how many copies you can make of the songs. The songs will sell for .69, .99, and $1.29. Tip of the hat to Apple on this move. Now people will really have no excuse not to buy songs from iTunes.
The patch for that security hole in Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0, which I mentioned here earlier, is finally out. There is only a patch for version 9.0 which will bring you up to 9.1. Earlier versions of Acrobat Reader haven’t had a patch released yet.
You can get Adobe Reader 9.1 and the security bulletin regarding it here. However, this release comes bundled with Adobe AIR. If you’d just like Acrobat Reader , without AIR, you can get it here.
There’s quite a few examples of how to exploit the hole found in 9.0 so I would seriously recomend getting the update.
If you’re not familiar with The Pirate Bay, it’s a BitTorrent tracker, probably the biggest in the world, that hosts links to “Torrents” which allow you to download just about anything that can be had digitally. Movies, music, software, and books can all be downloaded from there. Oh, I should mention that it’s mostly copyrighted material and therefore illegal in most countries.
The prosecution rested it’s case today and they are looking for jail time for the two. The prosecution started out quite weak when they misrepresented the way torrents work. The files that The Pirate Bay hosts are not the software ot movies, but links or bookmarks, somethe prosecution either didn’t know or intentionaly falsified. They also tried to claim that it was the ony place where you could get these links, which a simple google search proves incorrect. You can keep up to date at http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ You can also follow along on twitter http://twitter.com/spectrial
Seeing how I kinda let this one slip through the cracks. I figured anyone that was interested in it would already be following it. I also hate to just rewrite current news. So for a update on what has gone on in court the past 10 days, head on over to the site for all things torrent related,Torrent Freak for their day 10 wrap up fo the trial so far. There’s also video but it’s in Sweedish.
Ironically, The Pirate Bay has been down all day so I haven’t been able to get a screenshot for this post. Apprently, it’s a problem with the servers and they couldn’t be brought back up with a remote reboot. A crew is on it’s way to the ’secret’ locaton. There is no estimate on when it will be back up.
There’s no need to try and figure out what’s safe or real and what has more sinister plans in mind. The good folks at dshield.org have been keeping an updated list of third party information on conficker. Here you can find plenty of free conficker detection and removal tools, general information and the microsoft patch. That should help keep you updated, safe and informed.
The patch for that security hole in Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0, which I mentioned 
