Mobile and Secure.Com

I read a recent posting on The Register about the latest version of the AVG antivirus tool, which resulted in me disabling the LinkScanner tool.

AVG 8.0 added LinkScanner in April and apparently one of the things it does is to scan links on Search Engine pages before you click on them to make sure that the landing pages do not contain malicious code.

The article talks about the side effects of using LinkScanner such as increasing traffic to websites with no actual human interaction being involved in the visit, and increasing your internet bandwidth usage. All well and good but what about other implications? If you read further on page 2 of the posting it goes on to explain that AVG pretends to be you and doesn’t mask your IP address or anything, so as far as that site is concerned, you visited it.

So what’s the problem? Well if you searched for something in Google and got ten links returned, one or more of those links could be to adult or anti-social content and your computer would actually visit them. Your ISP would then have a log on its server saying that a computer at your IP address visited a site that contained pornography or other such material.

To turn of LinkScanner open the AVG User Interface, double-click LinkScanner and untick “Enable AVG Search-Shield”.

When I installed Service Pack 1 for Vista yesterday I noticed that hardware that I had disabled in Device Manager had been re-enabled.

Both my Wi-Fi and webcam hardware were now enabled. I had set them both to disabled because I don’t use them when I’m at home and I don’t want any potential malware using them either.

So make sure that if you upgrade Vista to SP1 that you check device manager for any unwanted changes.

Security researches have discovered a way of obtaining encryption keys for popular disk encryption systems including BitLocker and TrueCrypt by freezing the computer memory after gaining physical access.

You’ve heard of phishing, well Smishing is where you are sent an SMS text message telling you “thank you for signing up for service X and for your payment of £2. If you wish to cancel your subscription then log on to..” followed by a web site address that is designed to install malware on your computer or capture your personal details.

UK internet users face a ban if a proposal goes through to have their ISP detect if they are downloading copyrighted material. The ban is to be activated after the user receives two warnings followed by the detection of a further download of copyrighted material.

No information is available regarding how the detections will be carried out, how an ISP intends to prove that what is being downloaded is copyrighted and that the downloader does not own or have rights to access the download, or how false positives will be dealt with, or even how a user will be able to get back online if they have been falsely accused and banned.

What about users who share their internet connection or use a BT FON broadband router? If the downloading of copyrighted material is detected via your connection but it is not you that is doing the downloading, do you have a leg to stand on?

USB memory sticks are getting cheaper at the lower end of the storage capacity range (4GB and under) as the latest models sport even larger capacities. So it’s tempting to buy a few of the cheaper sticks rather than one larger model. You could use one for storing your digital photos, another for documents, and a third for video clips.

To secure your data you can encrypt your files (PGP, WinZip) or encrypt the whole drive (Truecrypt) with a growing selection of third party products. Or you can even buy a stick that comes complete with built-in hardware encryption like the Kanguru Defender Pro. You even have a choice of colours.

Do you have a list of web sites that you would like to block access to from your Windows PC? Maybe your children are spending way too much time on social network sites like MySpace instead of doing their homework, or one of the males in your house appears to spending a lot of time reading the articles on Playboy.

Well, instead of paying out for software you can block these sites yourself for free by doing nothing more than editing a text file.

In the Windows folder (default is C:\WINDOWS) go to \SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC and select the file called HOSTS. This file is probably write-protected so right-click it and select Properties and un-select ‘Read-only’.

Now open the file in Notepad and for every web site you wish to block access to, enter a line like the following:

127.0.0.1 www.playboy.com
127.0.0.1 www.myspace.com

When you have finished editing the file, select Properties again and re-enable the ‘Read-only’ attribute.

Now when you open a browser and select one of the sites listed in the HOSTS file, your browser will tell you that it was unable to connect.

Have you been a victim of e-fraud? Don’t know who to turn to? Then maybe you need to take a look at e-victims.org.

Occasionally I’m asked to secure a Windows PC or laptop as the owner has no idea about computer security, but they heard that they need it as they would like to access the internet to shop for these great deals they keep hearing about, or chat with friends (Messenger/Skype).

The main problem I encounter when I go around to their home with CD/USB stick in hand containing free security software, is that it’s easy enough for me to install and configure the software, but teaching them how to use it, that’s the hard part. Security software is not as transparent as we would all like it to be.
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For a while it seemed like everyone was cashing in on the USB craze, where every hardware and software application that you could dream up was available in USB format. All you would have to do is build a bare bones PC with lots and lots of USB ports and you could add everything you could possibly want.

From a security point of view it’s always useful to have a firewall, especially a hardware firewall. And now you can own your very own hardware firewall in the palm of your hand.