March 2009

A while back, Adobe was getting ready to release its Creative Suite 4. A pirated version of the software showed up on file-sharing networks, where a Mac version was available, and bundled with a Trojan horse. Unsuspecting users who installed it were immediately infected. In January, researchers found more malware in pirated versions of Apple’s new iWorks ‘09. And once again, pirated software for the Mac is being passed around embedded with malware. A good rule of thumb is that you should never install pirated versions of anything (on Windows or Macs) because it is illegal, and usually comes with malware.

Conficker (also known as Downadup) is a pretty nasty worm that has three known variations (A, B, and most recently C). It gets onto your machine through a Windows security flaw that was patched in October of 2008, and is programmed to call a sequence of control servers for updates and presumably other nasty activities. Recently, Kaspersky Labs, a security software and research company, was able to figure out the list of names the worm would check for updates and teamed with OpenDNS to block these attempts. Now researchers are saying that the worm is programmed to do something on April 1. What that is, they don’t know; they only know that it is set to “call home” on that day. Fortunately, there are many ways to remove the worm if you’ve been infected. And as always, keeping your antivirus and antispyware software up-to-date and installing Windows updates will help protect your machine.

Yesterday afternoon a file was found on the site Scribd which contained a list of approximately 4000 Comcast usernames and passwords. According to Comcast, the file did not come from within the company; Comcast has disabled the affected usernames and is contacting those customers to resolve the issue.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve seen a lot of machines infected with malware. In about 80% of the cases, I’ve had to completely reinstall Windows to clear up the problems. Not only is this time consuming (It takes 2-3 days depending on how busy we are) but it’s also expensive for the customer. So much can be avoided by running the latest internet security suite (I recommend Norton Internet Security 2009, available here) and keeping it up to date. If you think your machine is infected, run a scan using your security software. If you don’t think you’re running the latest version, you can do a free scan using Spyware Doctor (available from PC Tools here) or Trend Micro’s online scanning tool (on our website here, then click Free Tools). As always, if you have any questions or need help, just give us a call.