Category: Security
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Educate yourself on phishing today!
Email has long been a vector for more or less targeted attacks such as virus attacks, phishing, and spearphising. In my years of working in IT, I have seen a number of examples of this, including one which in effect took down most of the fileshare in a corporate environment for as much as a…
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Limit login to specific computers
As much as we might want to prevent them by policies, odds are that a shared user account will be created at some point. In order to mitigate the potential issues with such accounts (lack of accountability, lack of control, account available to just about anyone to mention a few), there are a number of steps we…
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Security questions: still a very, very bad idea
I was recently asked to update my security questions at a reputable site. They wanted three of them, and I filled them out. Once I’d done so, I became somewhat uneasy. The reason is that the questions were all pre-sets, not questions that I chose myself. More worryingly, they either had answers that frequently change…
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BitLocker asks for BitLocker Recovery Key at restart
Having gone from Windows XP to Windows 7, we are seeing a rash of new problems. One of these is that a lot of our users are unable to boot into Windows, as they are prompted for a BitLocker Recovery Key. The temporary fix for this is simple enough; look up and tell the user…
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Manually Removing Personal Security
In a post a while back, I wrote about how to remove Personal Security, a rather nasty piece of spyware. I recently had a computer in that was badly infected. I tried removing it with MBAM, but it kept on returning. Annoyed, and not wanting to do a reinstall, I found a list of…
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Removing Personal Security
I’ve recently had a few users call in, telling me that they’ve been infected with Personal Security, a rogue anti-spyware program from the same family as Cyber Security. Luckily, it’s pretty easily removed. Here’s how: Turn off System Restore on the infected computer Download and run rkill.com, which kills the processes Download and install…
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Resolving “Database is outdated” messages in AVG when there is no available updates
I’ve been a happy user of AVG Free for a long time. Granted, it’s never been exactly easy to get, but a google-search does the trick. Having run version 7.whatever for some time, I got a message that they’d soon stop supporting it, and that I should upgrade to version 8. All fine and well,…
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Securing transfer of Anti Virus policies
Fighting and defending against computer viruses is one of the largest challenges facing businesses and individuals in the IT world of today. To guard against this, most people have anti-virus software installed on their computers. However, even though you have anti-virus software installed, how can you be certain that the policy-files are the ones your…