Was hacked into. Meaning if you have accounts or ever created an account through these guys you may be getting some phishing scams coming your way.

Be careful and do not respond.

Sad day when a company has bad enough security that allows this many clients to have so much trouble.

Full Press Release

 

However if you use flash player for anything. For example youtube.com then you may need to clean out your Flash cookies. That means you have to go to a special url to clear them. Fun eh?

Click here to go to that super special site.

change the storage settings to None and Delete all sites. This will clear your flash cookies.

 

What to do?

Fortunately Adobe has a tool just for that.

Download it here

Run this and uninstall your adobe flash player.

Once it is uninstalled. reboot and go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer

install and flash should be good to go.

Have questions or need help?

Feel free to call us we are happy to help. 801-682-3064 or Twitter.

 

Today is the release of the update from 1.0 to 2.0 a few needed features and better support for your killing off of those pesky viruses.

Will this antivirus kill 100% of all viruses? NO. Unfortunately no antivirus can do such a thing. However it does it better than any other antivirus I have found.

Another great reason I prefer Microsoft Security Essentials is how well it integrates with native windows operating system utilities. Without adding extra fluff like its own firewall or proxy servers (this is true for your expensive Antivirus suites). These extras will commonly get attacked and slow down your computer. Microsoft Security Essentials does not slow down your pc unless it finds an virus or threat and it will immediately stop the process and let you know.

These features translate into not only faster boot and shutdown times but also a much smoother day to day protection.

What’s great is it now it allows Small Business users a free antivirus without cost. Now if we could just get this for the Enterprise size Business.

Never the less. Go update your copy of Microsoft Security Essentials. Did I mention it is free?

Let us know how much you like Microsoft Security Essentials on Twitter or Facebook.

 

The file that is created for hibernation to exist is “Hiberfil.sys” This file can be corrupted so easily by many different viruses as well as rootkits. I disable it by default. Besides Hiberfil.sys is typically 4+ gigs of data storage that can be reclaimed.

How to disable Hibernation:

To do this you will need administrator permission to change the setting.

I recommend an easy way is to create a new shortcut on your desktop.

1. Right click on Desktop

2. Choose New –> shortcut

3. In the text box type “CMD” click next through the wizard

4.Now you have a shortcut. Right click on the new cmd shortcut and scroll to run as administrator

5.Now you have a Administrator Command prompt

6. Type: “powercfg /h off” (without quotes of course)

7. if it works you will get a new line waiting your response.

Now you have turned off Hibernation in Windows. Now go enjoy some sleep…. (sleep mode still works)

If you have questions please feel free to catch up with Problem Solved Computer Repair on Twitter or Facebook

 

The best way to keep your internet surfing clean fun and fast not to mention safer. Using a controlled or 3rd party DNS provider.

First we should explain what a DNS is….

From Wikipedia:

“The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participants. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide. An often-used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the "phone book" for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example,www.example.com translates to 192.0.32.10.”

"…The Domain Name System distributes the responsibility of assigning domain names and mapping those names to IP addresses by designating authoritative name servers for each domain. Authoritative name servers are assigned to be responsible for their particular domains, and in turn can assign other authoritative name servers for their sub-domains. This mechanism has made the DNS distributed and fault tolerant and has helped avoid the need for a single central register to be continually consulted and updated.”

What does this mean?

Its how you use English names and translate them into a Physical Address or IP address.

Every day your router goes out and gets the latest dictionary of DNS addresses that you request via multiple DNS servers.

So how does this help me with anti-malware and site blocking? Well there are companies and services that will take over or become a man in the middle to filter you requests and block known DNS names that harbor unsafe, disgusting or unwanted web content. The greatest part of this filtering is you do not have to install software to get this protection and monitoring like many web filters do (Net Nanny and Such.).

Today I am going to focus on 3 services (DNS):

OPENDNS: My favorite by far. Create an account and setup your filtering preferences. Take the DNS IP address’s and magically it all works. DNS address: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

GoogleDNS: I like the speed however not sure exactly what “other” things google is tracking. DNS address: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

NortonDNS: This is a beta program but promises to do as well as its software suite with this extra bit of protection. DNS Address: 198.153.192.1 and 198.153.194.1

With all three of these services you will see significant speed increase accessing your favorite sites. You will also see better protection with “accidental” clicking on bad links.

Be safe and if you have any questions please feel free to call us (801)682-3064 for assistance.

 

“I have installed a well known anti-virus and have kept up on all updates on it.”

“I just found a pop-up that says I have over 50,000 virus’s (may or may not be a exaggeration). I have heard that there are these “fake anti-virus’s” How come my Anti-Virus doesn’t kill it?”

Where to start.

The easiest way to explain it is the Police Department theory. “If the police don’t know of a threat or a crime. It (crime) happens and the police come running. However all the criminals friends are distracting the police and the real criminal doesn’t get caught.”

Typical Anti-Virus software is very much like this.

The not so simple explanation.

You click on a link that takes you to a site and exposes a known vulnerability in software (operating system, firmware, applications, etc…). We have seen this with adobe, sun, Windows (you name it), OSX (yes even the beloved apple), Sun (Java) and many more. What typically happens is a link is clicked or an active x com object is installed and immediately kills any antivirus service that is working. Then it proceeds to mass download other virus’s and malicious content thus jamming up the most fastest processors with “crap calls” (yes that is a technical term made by me.) thus slowing your machine down to a crawl. Some even more fun virus’s add their own registry settings to stop your .exe’s from executing and other important files from working. So in a way with the virus taking over the anti-virus (which is typically very resource (CPU, Memory, I/O) heavy itself doesn’t have a chance to react. Some even more fun Virus’s/Spyware  introduce root kits that are the most evil of virus’s and are harder for an anti-virus to detect.

So why have an anti-virus? Well it gives you some protection. Not 100% but good protection from “Known” Virus’s. Because anti-virus’s are not 100% why pay for a anti-virus? or any anti-spyware?

What to Do:

Don’t install more than one anti-virus thinking you will get extra protection. In most cases you will get less and they will cancel each other out.

Install a good high performance anti-virus. One that does not need to take over your computer but one that boots up fast with your computer and sits quietly in the background (no pop-ups or annoying update information.). Also that does both antispyware and antivirus clean up.

Future.

Something you will see more of in the future is “Web Safe” anti-malware type applications.

That will be installed on your online profile. These are still experimental at best. Be careful of anything that wants to give you “Web Safe” anti-anything.

Be careful and enjoy!

 

according to a Lead Developer at Mozilla (Aza Raskin) 

There is a new phishing exploit attacking you without your knowledge. Tab Nabbing. We all now use tabbed browsers to do most of our web surfing. Its fun its easy and it feels somewhat efficient.

What this does is takes over or creates a new tab to look like or mimic another tab for example Gmail even though the url is completely different it looks and it feels like Gmail. So you enter in your credentials and now you have been phished.

A New Type of Phishing Attack from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Make sure you check your URL’s(Web Addresses) before submitting your login or important credentials.

More info soon.