A blog entry has been posted at Sophos about spam that they have received recently.

The article focused on a spam about the Manchester United which is a soccer team in the UEFA league. The author notes that this spam maybe took advantage of the recent happening in a soccer game where the team won a penalty shootout a few days ago against Chelsea.

The link in the email contains the club’s name except two vowels have been removed but it is still readable which may fool some users to click on it.

Some of the other subject lines in the recent spam that Sophos received are ‘Change your small trout into a great white shark’ and ‘She will remove her loin-cloth’.

Source: Sophos

GTA IV – Worm Target

Sophos has posted a blog entry last week about the popular video game, Grand Theft Auto IV. They noted that they saw a story on The Daily Mail which is a British newspaper about the game and that a new Trojan has targeted it. The Daily Mail claimed it is rojan-Downloader.Win32.VB.dck.

After investigating the case, they found that it is not a Trojan but it is a worm. The worm is capable of propagating itself over the Gunetalla network and it does this process by sharing itself. This particular worm also targets other video games such as Fortress 2 and Two Worlds.

Source: Sophos

A beta program has been released by Microsoft for its Windows Home Server product which fixes a serious bug. The bug is about a potential loss of files.

“We intend to allow adequate time for feedback and thorough testing during the beta process,” said company officials on the Windows Home Server team blog. They noted that, “It is at an extremely low level of the operating system and it requires thorough testing to ensure that the fix addresses the issue” in a different blog post.

The final version is schedule to be released in June.

Source: Information Week

New computers are one of those things where the novelty wears off pretty fast. One day it’s their new high tech toy and in a few months it’s just another computer. In another 2-5 years, many people would have already bought a new one and suddenly that high tech toy from a few years ago is just taking up space and they would like to get rid of it.

In this article I will show you how Computer Technicians can capitalize on this by offering a free computer disposal service to your clients.
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The new XO computer has a new design according to various tech sites. It is called XO 2.0 and it will be slimmer and lighter.

“Being small is very important. The current one is a little too big; it’s a little too heavy,” said the one laptop per child chairman, Nicholas Negroponte.

“It’s a totally new concept for learning devices,” he added since it will have a touch-screen keyboard which can double as a second display.

It will be produced in 2010 and it will cost as little as $75. Microsoft will begin on testing Windows XP on this new XO system in June.

Source: Information Week

FreshDiagnose is a small, free utility designed to help you diagnose and benchmark a computer. It can display much of the standard information that applications like SIW display such as software, hardware, devices, network and multimedia information. However, FreshDiagnose shows a lot of information that SIW does not, making it the perfect partner for SIW, which is probably already in your utility kit.
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According to an article at informationweek.com, the internet explorer version 7 from ISPs such as Comcast and Qwest may crash during the SP3 installation because they tend to be outdated.

The crash occurs because XP3 runs a dll file called XMLLite.dll and it is not compatible with versions of IE7 that were released before October.

“If you produce custom IE7 packages, then you need to ensure that those packages will install successfully on Windows XP SP3,” said Jane Maliouta to ISPs in her blog. She added that the ISPs can update their distributions by downloading a kit from Microsoft’s TechNet site.

Source: Information Week

A new problem has arise about the third service pack for Windows XP. Earlier today, an article was posted at Computerworld about a corruption on the Windows registry after installing it.

“The Network Connections screen now does not show any of the NIC cards. I have three adapters that used to show up,” said someone on Microsoft’s SP3 support forum.

“I upgraded three well-maintained laptop machines, one with NIS2008 [Norton Internet Security 2008] installed and running during the upgrade, one with NIS2008 installed but shut down during installation and one without NIS2008 installed. As you guessed, the one without NIS2008 upgraded like a charm. No problems. The other two have the same mess as identified by all in this thread,” said a different person.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

In our line of work, we spend a lot of time securing our clients by setting up firewalls, locking down servers, installing antispam, antispyware and antivirus software and more; but do you ever think about the security of your business?

Think about this for a second. What would happen if your main business computer and its backups were stolen and how much damage would it do to your business? Your emails, documents, customer and account database are all gone. It would be devastating to just about any business. In this article, we’ll show you how to secure your own business.
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Computerworld has posted an article that Microsoft will filter some computers with Windows XP so that they cannot receive the newest service pack. This decision was based on the problem that occurs on AMD-powered PCs that goes into an endless reboot pattern after installing SP3.

“The problem is a registry value, present on images created with Intel processors, that causes a driver (intelppm.sys) to load at boot. When intelppm.sys attempts to load on an AMD-based system upon the install of SP3, it causes a blue screen and the continuous reboot,” says a Microsoft representative on the Microsoft Update team blog.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD