We have posted in the past what an experienced computer technician carries with him onsite to a computer repair job. We also have an entire section dedicated to computer repair utilities that a computer techie may take with him and use on a job. Another thing that we carry around that doesn’t fall under the “computer repair category” are application installers (eg, iTunes). There is a list of what application installers I carry with me because they are frequently requested by clients.
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Microsoft has released a total of six sets of patches which fixes 11 bugs on their various operating system and software products.

One of the patches is about the Active Directory software. Eric Schultze who is the chief security architect for Shavlik Technologies said, “That one scares me because those are the crown jewels there. And it looks like you’re caught with your pants down at the moment.” This particular bug affects Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 systems.

If the hacker attacks a Windows Server 2003 system, he or she would need to be inside the corporate network to accomplish what he or she wanted to do.

Source: PC WORLD

ATF Cleaner is a free stand-alone utility that cleans up any temporary files that a computer may collect. This includes the Windows temp folder, Current User temp folder, All users temp folder, cookies, Temporary Internet Files, History, Prefetch, Java Cache & Recycle Bin.

It can also remove browser specific temporary files (Opera and Firefox) such as Cache, Cookies, History, Download History, Saved form information &, Saved passwords.
This is a tool should be run regularly by home users and is especially useful to run before a virus scan to prevent it getting stuck for a long time on temporary files.
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Chron.com has posted an information about the detection of a “false positive” on a SendPhotos program. This detection was made by AVG which is a free anti-virus program.

The site says that this detection started in a recent update by AVG. It blocked the user’s access to the program as a result.

AVG was made aware about this situation and the company issued a fix in an updated virus definition file. User’s who encountered this problem should update the anti-virus program to use SendPhotos once again.

Jay Lee, the author of the article at Chron.com, mentioned that AVG users can go to forum which is forum.grisoft.cz/freeforum. This is a site where users can post their situations and get feedback on them.

Source: Chron.com

When our family tech shop first started out, it was co-managed/owned ““ by what effectively was Ying and Yang of stock control (and we’ll leave the names as such to protect the guilty!). Ying’s approach was to buy nothing. Anything a customer wanted, over around the £20 mark, they had to order. You’d come in to make a purchase, ask for the part you wanted (e.g. monitor, hard drive, CDROM etc.) and have to leave a deposit and go back for your component in a couple of days.
Yang was the opposite. Anything and everything he could get his hands on, he did. However, Ying was the financial backer, and therefore was the one who got to say yes or no to new stock.
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The phone rings and on the other end is a potential customer willing to purchase a computer from you. They tell you that they want to do some music downloading, DVD burning and some video editing. You are eager to impress and tell them that they would need a DVD burner, a powerful video card and lots of RAM and HDD space for the video editing. You give them a ballpark range of how much such a computer will cost and they say thankyou and tell you that they will get back to you.

You never hear from them again. Why? Because after they picked your brain for the information they needed they went to the Dell website and brought the same computer there for cheaper. You gave too away much information over the phone.
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Symantec has announced a few days ago that there is a new Trojan horse. Its main purpose is to send spam. It uses Windows’ kernel libraries to accomplish its mission.

“It’s calling the kernel libraries it needs,” said Dave Cole of Symantec.

“Srizbi seems to move a step forward by working totally in kernel-mode without the need to inject anything into user-mode. To manipulate the network connection directly in kernel-mode, it attaches NDIS and TCP/IP drivers and gets all the Ndis* and Zw* functions that it needs. This technique also allows the Trojan to bypass firewall and sniffer tools, and to hide all its network activities,” wrote Kaoru Hayashi of Symantec in a blog entry. The article from Computerworld said that this means only advanced security tools will be able to detect this new Trojan horse.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

A PDF spam that was released by spammers using blurred/distorted text has been identified by an anti-spam software developer according to an article at The Register’s website.

It is “”a kind of Turing test for spam filters,” said Neil Cook. He is a European anti-spam specialist for a company called Cloudmark.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of PDF stock spams for the last 10 days or so, and there was another spike last night. Images are particularly easy for humans to pick up, but particularly hard for computers,” he added.

The fingerprinting technology has managed to stop these kind of PDFs for now claimed Cook. This means that most of the population will receive these kind of spam.

Source: The Register

A virus called BotVoice.A has been identified by Panda Labs. It deletes the user’s system files and it also makes the user’s PC to no longer function.

Unlike other computer viruses, this one notifies the user that the user’s PC has been infected by a virus. It uses Microsoft text reader software and it tells the user “You have been infected. I repeat, you have been infected and your system files have been deleted. Sorry. Have a nice day and bye bye,” in a synthesized voice.

The article from switched.com does not mention how a user can get infected, whether from an email message or from a malicious webpage.

Source: Switched

Infoworld.nl has posted an article on how to transfer and read a Mac OS X formatted USB Drive to a computer with a Windows operating system.

The article suggested to try a program called MacDrive. It is a program that can read and write to the same format that the Mac OS X have.

Another program that was mentioned is MacDisk. The price for MacDrive is $49.89 and MacDisk costs $66.74. Both are listed with US Dollar currency.

It also mentions that there are trial version for each of these software. For the MacDrive, users are allowed to use the software within 5 days. In MacDisk’s case, the trial have limited features and it only allows to copy files that are 1 MB or less.

You can read more information in the link below.

Source: Infoworld