404 Tech Support

After continuing to receive additional spam daily through the same campaign that I posted here a week ago, I decided it was time to escalate things. It became apparent that the Unsubscribe link on these e-mail messages wasn’t doing anything. If the FTC enforced the CAN-SPAM Act this would be the proper venue and for now it’s about the only action that we can take.

You can find out more information about spam at the FTC’s website for it: www.ftc.gov/spam/

On the left-hand side, you can click ‘File a Complaint’ to move to the next step.

Checking Twitter tonight for more MediaTemple news, I saw the latest Tweets of those people I follow. Among that list was also a posting by a person I didn’t know, I didn’t follow, and didn’t follow me. This random person and random post just seemed to appear in my list without reason. Anybody know why or see this before?

I confirmed I wasn’t following them and have no acquaintance with them. Any thoughts?

It appears there is a malvertisement (malware being delivered through website ads) attack campaign in full force and after today I’d guess it’s on the up-swing. After having a number of people in separate physical locations report the exact same malware installed on their machine, things start looking bad. I’m never one for jumping to trends and hopping to conclusions, but I know what makes for a bad day. XP Internet Security 2010 is a Fake AntiVirus that will get installed on your machine and start reporting infections and trying to get you to buy it. (It’s a scam! Don’t give them any money!) The worst thing, however, is that the malware tools currently aren’t detecting it or able to remove the infection.

If you have more than one person using a computer, things can get a little bit frustrating when preferences, bookmarks, and software might be different between people and accounts. The standard way of dealing with this is to use Windows accounts to log in under your own account or ’switch users’. I’m not a big fan of this approach because it can potentially leave a lot of stuff running in the background and the time to log out of one account and into another can be annoying. With that in mind, I came up with a few other tricks to let somebody have their own preferences without logging out.

I hate it when I download something and it tries to install more stuff than what I asked for. Thus I composed this Directory of Bloatware comprised of software that I’ve encountered recently that try to install more than what was listed.

I know a lot of companies use these additional installations as their revenue stream in order to provide free software, but the ‘bloat’ label is still accurate. It unnecessarily increases the size of the installer I’m downloading and the amount of software installed on my computer if I just go through the default install. A bigger installed software footprint means there are more applications that need to be kept up-to-date or could potentially have system-compromising vulnerabilities. I would like to see an industry standard where tag-along software must be listed along with the download link.

After cleaning up a virus today for one of my users, I noticed an odd remaining side effect: No executables would successfully launch. This included Explorer.exe under the user’s account that got infected, so after they would login it would just sit there at a blank screen. You could press Ctrl+Alt+Del to launch the Task Manager, but trying to run any executable would result in a message like this:

Windows cannot open this file: File: notepad.exe

Deploying software through group policy is a great way to ensure all computers are up-to-date and running the same version but unfortunately, not everything runs as smoothly as we would like. I ran into a problem last Friday trying to deploy the updated Java RE 6 Update 18 where the antivirus would tie up the installer until the install process timed out. This only happened on 5 machines out of hundreds, but through it I think I found some best practices to do when you have a hung deployment trying to install on a computer.

Despite my attempts to educate here at 404TS, I still continue to receive screenshots and images inside of .doc files. Other times, you might have to revise a document or convert a Word document to a wiki or webpage. In any case where you need to extract the images from a Word document, hopefully the following three methods will help.

Here’s an example of an image saved in a Word document:

Method #1

The best way to obtain the image is to save the Word document as a web page. This method will give you the image in its original size and format and the thumbnail in jpg format. Go to the Office Button, Save As, and Other Formats.