Two Easy Things You Can Do To Protect Yourself From CryptoLocker

It finally happened, I saw my first case of a CryptoLocker variant on one of my users laptops. If you are not familiar with it, Wikipedia describes it as: ...a ransomware trojan which targeted computers running Microsoft Windows, believed to have first been posted to the Internet on 5 September 2013. CryptoLocker propagated via infected email attachments, and via an existing botnet; when activated, the malware encrypts certain types of files stored on local and mounted network drives using RSA public-key cryptography, with the private key stored only on the malware's control servers. The malware then displays a message which offers to decrypt the data if a payment (through either bitcoin or a pre-paid cash voucher) is made by a stated deadline,...

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Check your antivirus reports for false positives

The other night my email blew up because we use ClamWin on all of our servers. We do this because it has a decent detection rate, it can email out alerts, and it doesn't bog down the system with on-access scanning. We schedule it to scan once a week during off-peak hours. Well the latest scans produced an epic ton of false positives. Pretty much any exe, or dll on the system was flagged as having been infected with Win.Trojan.Bancos-2115. I wasn't the only one that felt the impact of this. Apparently people who use Barracuda's felt it too because ClamAV is what Barracuda uses for virus detection engine. Here's how my report log looked: Well in my research over this false positive, I learned of a tool one can use to verify if the file...

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Designing Smart Sites for Smartphone Users

Last May, U.S. mobile search queries passed desktop queries for the first time, confirming a long-anticipated trend, according to Google. Smartphone usage grew 394 percent between December 2010 and December 2014, while tablet usage increased 1,721 percent, with the two devices combining to account for 60 percent of time spent on social media, according to comScore. As the growth of mobile changes the dynamics of Internet access, web design is changing accordingly. Here are some of the design trends that are transforming websites into smart sites for smartphones. Defining Smart Sites A smart site is a website midway between a traditional multi-page website and a one-page landing page. A traditional site has multiple pages of content that...

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Get notified via email when your VPN connection drops in Windows

Last Friday I mentioned a tool that lets me kill my Bittorrent client if my private VPN connection drops so the fuzz can't catch me in the act of *gasp* downloading my favorite TV shows. Today I will tell you how you can get notified via email if that connection drops so you know when to check on your media server. This method is similar to my method for notifying you when someone in Active Directory gets locked out. It uses a PowerShell script and a scheduled task that looks for a specific event in the event log, and when that event happens the script is ran and an email is sent off. You can look at my Active Directory script post to see how to setup the scheduled task. For VPN being dropped, the event you want to use as your trigger is: Log:...

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Automatically kill your torrent client when your VPN drops in Windows

Well, it happened again. I received another warning letter from my ISP for downloading one of my favorite TV shows. The really sucky part is that I've been using a VPN service to hide my torrent activities for a while so I shouldn't have been detected. The problem is that occasionally the VPN connection will drop for some unknown reason. Maybe the issue is with the VPN company, maybe the issue is with my home router, maybe the issue is with my ISP. Who really knows, But the VPN connection will drop. When it drops, I'm exposed! For a while I tried using the SOCKS5 proxy service my VPN company offers, but for some reason RSS feeds don't work right with that so I had to turn it off in order to get my latest show downloads. When that is off,...

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