Monday, July 25, 2016

AVG and McAfee - Not Safe


Again, please give up on so-called "security" products from AVG and McAfee.

As reported here they are not safe!

Should you not know what to replace them with then give me a call at four.one.four-seven.one.nine-two.nine.seven.seven. I look forward to hearing from you.

Stay safe!


Saturday, July 23, 2016

What browser?


I got an email from a customer and believe my reply might be of interest to many people. The customer quoted an article from another blog(?) that recommended to search directly out of the URL field. Here is my reply verbatim as I sent it:
The crux with all these "easy" tips is that they all play right into the industry's game.

The more searches any given search engine gets to perform the more money they can ask for their aggregated info on what we search for. The search engine companies may not directly advertise to us but the companies that buy this aggregated search information can then advertise better and more directly to us.
  • It's a fact that Bing and Yahoo (they use Bing) do NOT show us what in the search results are paid advertisements.
  • It's a fact that way too many advertisements get abused to get malicious programs on our computers.
  • It's a fact that some web browsers (like IE and Edge, both from Microsoft!) make it very difficult or don't allow us at all to suppress advertisements.
  • It's a fact that Google does not allow us to suppress certain advertisements in Google's own Chrome browser.
All the before said and more is behind my STRONG recommendation to use only Firefox as I set it up for my customers.

And I urge my customers to search ONLY out of the little browser specific Search window:
because when you search from there you get a Google search result
MINUS any advertisement(s),
PLUS the red, yellow and green Web of Trust ratings right by every search result.
AND your search with Google has happened anonymously!

Update Jan. 10th 2017:
Sadly around November 5th 2016 Mozilla, the organization that supplies Firefox and Google have removed that piece of code from their download pages; some details are here.
If you remove the WOT extension or add-on from your Firefox browser it currently can not be re-installed!
Google recently made the WOT extension available again.
If that is not reason enough for any of my customers it's their decision and their money if I have to clean up their machine again.
 Stay safe!

Monday, July 4, 2016

Norton "Security" Software - REALLY INSECURE


It is a shame that "the media" ignore these facts and thus allow millions of computer users to live with unsafe computers.

A few quotes from The Register's recent article
  • Scores (or thousands, or millions) of enterprise and home Symantec users are open to remote compromise through multiple now-patched (where possible) wormable remote code execution holes described by Google as 'as bad as it gets'.
  • They [the security flaws] don’t require any user interaction, they affect the default configuration...
  • Victims would not even need to open the malicious files to be compromised.
  • Some of those [affected] platforms cannot be upgraded. 
Towards the end of the article The Register seems to quote six actions users should take to secure their systems. Four of those six are impossible to even think of for normal home users; they require corporate installations and corporate management structures that just are non-existent in home installations.

The other two require a level of know-how and technical expertise that is equally non-existent in the average home user environment.

The only consequent reaction for home user is what I preach to my customers for years:
Ditch any and all Norton products.
If you have allowed that Norton automatically charges your credit card you have to revoke that permission. You can get their phone number(s) through this web page.

Normally uninstalling them from Programs and Features in the Control Panel is not enough. I recommend to additionally run the Norton Removal Tool downloaded from this page; click on either of the links "Download@MajorGeeks".

Stay safe.