MAC Update, Virus Check, SkyDrive, SMB 150 Award

A few short updates for you:

MAC Users: A flood of new viruses is coming down the pipe to MAC users. Long exempt from hackers because there was simply not enough money it in, finally enough MACs are in use that the magic critical mass has been reached and hackers have turned their attention to exploiting them. Recently a JAVA hack infected over 600,000 MACs that were not running the most current updates. Please be sure to install all available updated, especially JAVA and Adobe updates as released and you need to be running anti-virus software. Our favorite anti-virus for MACs is Sophos. If you need to purchase it, let your IT person know and we’ll get if for you.

Home Computer Virus Check: The FBI has been redirecting traffic from computers infected with the DNSChanger virus for a long time now. DNSChanger redirects your computer browser to look-alike websites designed to fool you into thinking that you really are on Amazon or your bank website. It then collects the information you put into your account. The FBI was redirecting you back to the real site to thwart the hack but all of that is coming to an end July 9th. They have now shutdown the hacker network and so the FBI is ready to shutdown their fix for it. But this means that if your Home PC is infected after July 9th you won’t be able to get to any Internet sites. To check and see if you are infected you need to go to http://dns-ok.us/ If the background is green you’re in the clear. If it’s not green give us a call and we’ll help you clean it up.

SkyDrive: SkyDrive users need to login and accept a free upgrade in order to keep the 25GB of FREE storage space they have enjoyed from Microsoft. Please go to https://skydrive.live.com/ and accept the upgrade to keep your 25GB. If you do not, then you will be reduced to only 7GB. This is a limited time customer loyalty offer. All new SkyDrive accounts will only get 7GB with additional space available for purchase. Since Windows Phone, iPhone and Windows 8 are all integrated with Microsoft’s Live it’s becoming increasing important.

SMB 150: On Tuesday Amy was named to the SMB 150 Channel Influencers List. She joins a group of esteemed colleagues who were chosen during a two-phase voting process. In the initial stage, channel community members voted on 400 nominees. Following the community vote, a panel of industry experts evaluated each nominee based on a pre-established rubric. The community vote accounted for 40% of each nominee's overall rating, with the expert panel's decision contributing the remaining 60%. This award is sponsored by SMBNation, SMBTN and Blackberry. Amy will be receiving a Blackberry Playbook and has been invited to the awards dinner and ceremony in Los Angeles.

A phony crisis in London

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Randi Lou Franklin. She is the owner of Inter-Lingua a firm that provides translation and interpretation services for many languages and specializes in medical, technical and engineering. I lost track of how many languages she speaks, oh and she’s a lawyer too. Smart woman. She’s got a bunch of employees with experience in various fields.

She also writes a blog on dBusiness.com and related a story for me about the day she was hacked. She blogged it too. It’s called A Phony Crisis in London and recounts the day malware sent a message to every email address it discovered in her computer telling everyone she knew that she was in London, her wallet and ID stolen and needed them to wire her some money to the hotel so she could get home. Guess what? In her line of business this is a plausible story! The bad guys had set up an account to collect money from her concerned friends and business associates. You can read the whole blog here: http://www.dbusiness.com/Blogs/Annual-2010/A-Phony-Crisis-in-ldquoLondon-rdquo/

This is a prime example of how hacking works these days. They aren’t after the vast wealth and International secrets contained in your business. They are after your money. This is why we’re such pests when it comes to anti-virus software, good firewalls, Internet use monitoring and protecting inbound access to your network. These guys are smart, very smart.

So what could Randi Lou have done? First off she uses aol.com for e-mail (has for years and doesn’t want to change). But the fact that this is public email is a problem. If she used a business email client, then we could restrict outbound e-mail. We could scan it for suspicious content, malware and virus. We could make sure it is only delivered from her office to our filtering service and no where else, where it would have been caught. Of course nothing is 100% but we can get close and that will keep your business from a similar embarrassment.

Thank you Randi Lou for being so honest and providing your experiences in writing for everyone to learn from. A person that can learn from their mistake is the most intelligent kind.

Alert: Intuit phishing scam email

A scam email has been sent and we received an alert from Intuit. It is fairly convincing and they are concerned that many of their customers may have followed the instruction in the email and infected themselves. We would like two things: Please let us know if you received the email. We will pass the information along to Intuit to help them gauge the spread. Please also let us know if you followed the instruction so we can disinfect your computer.

Here’s a copy of the email:

From: Intuit Company [mailto:update@intuit.com]
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 11:55 AM
Subject: Intuit Update

Dear customer,

NOTE: Read this letter up to the end. You will mislay access to your account on Intuit website without actions described below,
Because of the increasing number of attemptsto hack the accounts of clients we are doing everything to perfect the technology of our security system. Thats why you need to do these actions to perfect the security of your Laptop.
Please do all the actions of this instruction:
1. Change your password on your private cabinet at least once a month.
2. Install and update your antivirus regularly.
Do not pass login and password from our service to others.
3. Do not install expansion to your browser from the unknown vendors.
4. Download and install Intuit Secure Software, which guards your browser from viruses done to steal information (usernames, passwords, etc.). Also it will provide additional security when working with a private cabinet and your financial information. NOTE: Beginning with 24 of April 2010 you wont have an admittance to the services of our company without an installed Intuit Secure Software.
System requirements :
Mozilla FireFox 2.0 and above
Windows XP, Vista, 2000, 2003, Seven
Internet Explorer 6.x, 7.x, 8.x
ATTENTION: You will not be able to use our service without update from 24 of April 2010
Download :
·  Intuit Secure Software for Quickbooks Users
·  Intuit Secure Software for Intuit Merchant holders
·  Intuit Secure Software for PayCycle customers
·  Intuit Secure Software for Quicken users

If you are not Microsoft Windows user you can use our services as usual

HotMail and FaceBook compromised

HotMail: If you have a hotmail account, please go there now and change your password. Thousands of hotmail passwords have been farmed. Here’s now:

<copied from ask-leo.com> First login to your Windows Live Hotmail account, and then click the Options link in the upper right:

And then at the bottom of the resulting list, click on More options...:

On the resulting page, click on View and edit your personal information:

At this point you may be prompted to re-enter your password. This is a security measure to prevent just anyone from walking up to your computer and changing your information.

There's something interesting to note about the screen that you land on:

"When you change your password for Windows Live Hotmail, you're also changing it for all your Windows Live based services."

Note that it stopped talking about Hotmail. This is your Windows Live account.

Why does that matter?

Because your Windows Live account is used for all Windows Live services including Hotmail, Messenger Spaces and more. When you change your password for Windows Live Hotmail, you're also changing it for all your Windows Live based services.

Near the center of that page you'll see a section labeled Password reset information:

Click on Change on the Password: line and you'll get this box:

Naturally you must type in your old password in order to prove that you are who you say you are and are authorized to make changes.

As you type your new password the new Password Strength indicator will show you just how strong your password is. Having a strong password that's difficult to guess is incredibly important to the security of your account. Make sure you always have a strong password.

As an additional security measure you can instruct Windows Live to automatically require you to change your password every so often. While this can be seen as annoying, it's actually another layer of security to protect your account from theft.

Click on Save and you're done.

Facebook: is having a different problem all together. Facebook is popping up with rogue anti-virus warning and installations. This means you don’t have a virus --- the warning message is the virus. If you follow through, then you will have a virus. In this scenario, the vector is yet unknown but the infection is happening. Meaning we can’t yet say how you got it, you just did.

You will notice a weight loss post to the notes or wall section of your facebook page. The text will look something like this:

Wow, this woman’s story has inspired me to lose weight facebookhealth4.com

I stumbled across this woman’s weight loss blog today, really interesting facebookhealth5.com

These things must work well for losing weight, check out this woman’s blog and what she did facebookhealth4.com

Once you visit the included link a pop-up will occur telling you that you have a virus and need to clean it – click here. Don’t do that, that is the virus asking you to install it.

If you see any such post you should delete the item from your Wall or Notes immediately.

Be careful out there. These things come in waves and it that we another one has rolled in.

---------------

Harbor Computer Services provides IT services to businesses in Southeastern Michigan. Find out more about us www.harborcomputerservices.net