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.

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.

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

After years of working with computers: taking out and replacing components, opening them up, upgrading them, and generally being comfortable inside them, I built my first PC years ago. I’m mostly self-taught on building computers, but I’ve got a number of from-scratch computers under my belt now and thinking about it, once you have the parts it’s pretty straight forward. This list is procedural memories from my mind, so feel free to add to this list any corrections or best practices that you have.

Do you have a genuine version of Firefox installed? Did it install a bunch of malware alongside your browser? Is Microsoft allowing this to sabotage your first impression of Firefox? The browser wars are getting ugly. Why isn’t Mozilla doing anything to stop this phishing attempt that is ruining their good name and adding more machines to the botnet?

Adobe held good on their word and released a patch for Adobe Reader and Acrobat, bringing them up to version 9.3, to patch a serious exploit with the Javascript engine inside of Reader and Acrobat. This is the the third time the Javascript engine has been exploited leading many people to disable it completely. For information on how to disable Javascript inside Adobe Reader and Acrobat in a standard case and in a scalable manner, you can read this previous 404 Tech Support article. Although Adobe promised to make the patch available on January 12th and delivered with this security bulletin, it was well after 5 PM Central Time when it was released.

As part of routine maintenance, you should be updating Java and a slew of other common browser plugins. If you haven’t been, don’t worry. Now is the perfect time to make sure you’re running the latest version of Java. Just head over to this Java webpage to ensure that you’re running the latest version which is (as of publishing) Version 6, Update 17. If you’re running an older version, head over to Java.com to download and then install the latest version for your operating system.

If you’re viewing a large (file-size) PDF in Firefox, you might occasionally get an error message saying “The file is damaged and could not be repaired.” However, if you try to open the PDF in Internet Explorer or save the file to the desktop and open it in Adobe Reader it works just fine. This fact causes you to doubt the validity of the message you’re receiving in Firefox, as it should. There is nothing wrong with the file and it seems to be isolated to opening the PDF in Firefox.