"Security" software breaks Windows

It gets fun again - my life I mean; the rest of this blog post is dead serious, please make no mistake.

For years I have recommended NOT TO USE products from Webroot. I remember too many bad experiences with and infections on computers that were presumably "protected by Webroot".

In NBC's words:

An antivirus service used by tens of thousands of businesses and millions of home users shut down an untold number of computers around the world Monday after it mistakenly identified core parts of Microsoft Windows as threats, the company confirmed.

Similar events have occurred in the past; sadly they are much more common than we would like and the public hardly knows about it. Some well known companies in the "computer security" or "anti virus" business have had similar snafus. Here is a quote from a blog post at Bleepingcomputer.com:

... Such mishaps have been reported for years to include major anti-virus/security vendors such as Panda, avast, AVG, BitDefender, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, McAfee and Symantec. In most cases when these issues occur, the anti-virus vendors and security tool developers take quick action to correct the problem and provide support to those users who have been affected.

To call such blunders a "mishap" is not a euphemism, IMHO it is outright glossing over or covering up a major blunder.

Things like this should not happen and they don't need to happen, they are major avoidable blunders. In every case we can only speculate about the "why" and I don't like to speculate.

What does all the above tell us? IMHO very simple:

Do not trust a single word in high gloss, pretty brochures.
Do not believe the words in computer related advertisements on TV.

What you find in high gloss publications is mostly marketing hype and likely not really trustworthy. And when certain "security" software seemingly out-of-the-blue suddenly is being hyped over the moon in TV advertisements it IMHO is time to run for the hills. It tells me that very likely a marketing campaign has to cover up some so called "mishap".

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So far I have used the acronym IMHO three times in this blog post. Generally there are always at least two ways to look at something, as we say around computers YMMV. If you have a different opinion - or maybe simply think I am a dumba.s then I ask you to please leave a comment, state your case or blow off steam below. 

Thank you in advance.

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!

Norton Software IS RISKY!

For years I recommend to my customers and on my radio shows to stay away from so called "security products" from the big names like Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro and many others.

The makers of the Norton branded software is a company called Symantec.

Here is revealing and interesting article about Symantec and some of the major security problems in some of their software.

If you want to entrust the security of your computer to Norton software be my guest. I don't mind at all to clean up the mess.

Stay safe!

2016-01-28 WBKV Talking Points

Through 20 years of effort, we have successfully trained every computer user
to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember,
but easy for computers to guess.

10 most used passwords in 2015 (truly a list of shame!):

123456
password
12345678
qwerty
12345
123456789
football
1234
1234567
baseball

Please, in the interest of privacy and safety, use a password manager and let it create long passwords.

Wifatch virus actively protects its victims from other forms of malware;
It infects routers, not computers;

It is written in the Perl programming language
It targets so far only ARM (83%), MIPS (10%), and SH4 (7%) processors
It connects infected devices to a peer-to-peer network

Basically it only infects devices that are not protected at all in the first place!

A Symantec (Norton) partner company in India uncovered as major player in the all too common technical support scam. 

Security Suites from AVG and Avast install dangerous browser add-ons!

McAfee and Norton tell Windows 10 users that they better use Internet Explorer, a browser so bad that Microsoft gave up on it!

For years I advise against ALL of the well known “security suites”, free or paid versions, no difference.

"Free" Security programs - For A Price

I stumbled over this article on How-To-Geek.

I wan to save you the hassle and time to read this lengthy article your self and will quote a few selected and IMHO most relevant snippets.

My stance toward the remaining "free" security programs as well as the well known commercial offerings is known; I have expressed this here repeatedly. So let's begin:

1. Free antivirus applications aren’t what they used to be. Free antivirus companies are now bundling adware, spyware, toolbars, and other junk to make a quick buck.... At one point, free antivirus was just advertising, pushing users to upgrade to the paid products. Now, free antivirus companies are making money through advertising, tracking, and junkware installations.
    
2. Comodo ... change[s] your web browser’s search engine to Yahoo! and bundles the GeekBuddy paid tech support software. It also bundles other Comodo products you might not want, including changing your DNS server settings to Comodo’s servers and installing “Chromodo,” a Chromium-based browser made by Comodo. ... As the Comodo-affiliated PrivDog software contained a massive security hole similar to the one Superfish had, there’s a good chance you don’t want a bunch of other Comodo-developed software and services thrown onto your computer.
    
3. Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware pushes “Web Protection” that will “secure your online search” by setting SecureSearch as your web browser’s homepage and default search engine. Despite the name, this isn’t actually a security feature. Instead, it just switches your web browser to use a branded search engine that actually uses Yahoo! in the background — this means it’s powered by Bing.
   If you prefer Bing, that’s fine — just use the full Bing website. You’ll have a better experience than using Lavasoft’s rebranded, stripped-down search engine.
    
4. Avira encourages you to install “Avira SafeSearch Plus.” This is just a rebranded version of the Ask Toolbar, redirecting your search results through a rebranded version of Ask.com’s search engine. If you wouldn’t want the Ask Toolbar installed, you wouldn’t want this rebranded version of it installed either.
    
5. ZoneAlarm also wants you to enable “ZoneAlarm Search” as your browser’s default homepage and search engine, along with installing a ZoneAlarm toolbar that is - once again - a rebranded version of the Ask Toolbar.
    
6.  Panda {Free Antivirus] attempts to install their own browser security toolbar as well as change your browser’s search engine to Yahoo, and its home page to “MyStart,” which is powered by Yahoo. To Panda’s credit, they at least don’t attempt to trick you by offering you a renamed Yahoo search engine or home page.
    
7. avast!’s installer also tries to install additional software you might not want. We’ve seen Dropbox offered here in the past, but avast! attempted to install the Google Toolbar when we tried installing it.
   Programs like the Google Toolbar and Dropbox are high-quality software you might actually want, so avast! comes out looking very good compared to the other options here. But even avast! has done done some questionable things in the past — witness the avast! browser extension inserting itself into your online shopping.
    
8. AVG has its own suite of obnoxious utilities, including the AVG Security Toolbar, AVG Rewards, AVG Web TuneUp, and SecureSearch.
    
9. BitDefender offers a stripped-down free antivirus. ... BitDefender is still pursuing the strategy of attempting to upsell you to the paid product.
    
10. MalwareBytes doesn’t attempt to install any extra junk on your computer, although the free version doesn’t offer real-time protection. To their credit, MalwareBytes is offering a free tool that’s useful for manual scans - it even picks up and detects [and removes!] much of the adware other programs install - and encouraging you to pay for a more full-featured product.
    This tool could be quite useful in combination with another antivirus, like Microsoft’s free Windows Defender or Microsoft Security Essentials solution. But it’s not a standalone free antivirus you can depend on, as it lacks the real-time scanning.

 Not too nice a situation out there, right? You either pay up or you have to live mostly with junk you did not want in the first place.


Don't despair, a good, time proven free solution is available since about 2009.

For now over 13 years I "fix" my customer's home computers by removing all sorts of viruses and other malicious or obnoxious software. Most of my customers call themselves "computer illiterate". All of them have lived safely with mostly little or no manual effort.

The only malware infections happen now when someone "falls" for a social engineering trick; that is in effect when the customer for a moment was inattentive. And hat is just a human weakness, I know from my very own experience.

If you want to know details about this solution plese drop me a personal email; thank you.

Important Update for Adobe Flashplayer

Please click this link if you are looking for information on Windows 10.

Adobe released an emergency patch for it's ubiquitous Flash Player.

You should now be at least on version 18.0.0.194.

You can check the version in Control Panel, Flash Player; click on the Update tab.

Caution: Adobe gets paid to coax you to download and install McAfee Security Scan.

If you run your computer like I recommend (and may have set up) then you do not need/want this blind passenger!

Adobe's update web page looks like this:

Watch for the always pre-selected check box (big red arrow); please DE-select the check mark before you click on "Install now".

As usual I welcome suggestions and comments right here in the blog.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

Bye bye Viruses, Hello Carelessness

It's almost like in the Everly Brothers song "Bye Bye Love" from 1957. They sang

Bye bye happiness, hello loneliness...

I am enticed to, no, don't be afraid, not sing but say

Bye bye viruses, hello carelessness...

In August 2014 I wrote in this blog the 2014 Update On Malicious Programs. Everything in this article is still valid today – which in the fast changing world of computers is astonishing all by itself. Self replicating viruses that "find and infect" our computers by their own accord have gone almost extinct.

What has massively changed though are the tricks and methods used by miscreants to foist their malicious junk software on our computers. It is so bad that I feel compelled to say

Do NOT click on any link in any email,
do NOT open any email attachment
and NEVER click in any advertisement.

Does that sound extreme to you? Good, because it is extreme. We are in an extreme situation and it's getting worse so extreme measures seem appropriate.

In the meantime you have learned to immediately delete emails with an unfamiliar sender address. But what about the email from that buddy of yours who always sends all the jokes? My advice is to IGNORE it! Just hit the Delete button. If that email really was from him and if he were a nice guy he would have told you in the email why and what he sends there. If he does not have the decency to do that you better err on the side of caution and delete that email; you may “miss” a joke but what is that compared to $100 or $200 cost for a good clean-up job?

Another way how modern malware (called PuPs) is distributed are dirty tricks pulled on us when we apply required updates. Even big, well known companies participate in these schemes; names that come to mind as examples are Oracle, Norton, McAfee and Adobe. Some visual examples are here.

And don't get me going on advertisements. Listen up:

If you see advertisements on your computer screen then you computer most likely already is compromised. Get it cleaned up!

And then the sneaky methods that well known download web sites like Download.com, Cnet.com and other use. You want to download that nice free little program and what they give you is a specially crafted downloader program that in turn is supposed to download the program you actually want. But what you get are one or several PuPs and then the program you really wanted.

The only method to help here is to watch for the tricks, traps and deceptions. 

In July 2013 I published my 10 Commandments Of Safe Computing. To heed the first of these has become more important than ever before; it reads:

Thou shalt read and think(!) before you click.

Be vigilant, pay attention to details and always remember: If it sounds too good to be true it usually is not true; especially in this day and age on the Internet.

As usual I welcome suggestions and comments right here in the blog.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

Computer 101 - The 2012 Edition

Disclosure:
Recently I found this article on a blog called The Consumerist. I liked the contents of this article very much but it clearly was written by a computer nerd for other computer nerds.

I took the liberty to re-write most of the article in a form and language that I hope is better suited for my customers. Here it is:  

1. Keep all your data backed up.
    
   Put your data on an external disk drive, upload it to a safe storage website, copy it to another computer or even on a CD or a DVD (most cumbersome!), somewhere, anywhere but please back up your data files!
   
   I am perfectly aware that many of my customers will have issues in setting everything up correctly but as usual I can help.
   
   Having your data on your computer only is NO GOOD, having data files in two places is a MUST. If one of these sets of data files fails you need to create another second storage location! This will save you $$ and a lot of aggravation.
   
   Manufacturer warranties do not cover your data files; you need to protect them yourself. Back up your documents, pictures, emails, email addresses (or contacts), bookmarks (or favorites), tax files, music, videos and ANY business information you may have.
   
   The only exception to my rule "free software for everything" covers data backup. You need a sufficiently large external disk drive and a piece of software costing $30 per computer.
   
   If set up correctly this program will keep all your data files automatically up to date on the external disk drive without you having to do anything except the initial set up. As usual I can help with that.
   
   
2.  Have a current recovery disc for each computer you have.
   
   This is your licensed copy of your OS. You no longer get operating system disks with a new computer; it’s all stored on the disk drive. It is specific to your computer's internals like processor, mother board, sound and graphics. It has the device drivers your computer needs to do its most basic tasks. Burn a recovery disk on to DVDs right away when you get your computer and put the DVD somewhere safe. It may easily take up to 3 hours to do.
   
   If you lose the recovery disk then you can order a new one from your manufacturer for between 15 and 50 dollars, depending on the brand. HP is usually cheaper, Sony is wickedly expensive. They take about 2 or 3 weeks to arrive; that is a looong wait if you need them NOW to replace a hard drive or to fix Windows.
   
   There is a significant difference between recovery disks and a repair disk that you need to be aware of. You can read about that here. You have to be aware of that significant difference. And you have to be aware of the fact that if you have to use these recovery disks your computer will be thrown back to exactly the state it was in at the very moment when the recovery disks where created! Here I am talking about recovery disks created with the standard Windows Vista and Windows 7 system tools, not disks created with manufacturer specific programs; the latter reset your computer to original factory new state. You don't want to go back there losing all updates and so on.
   
   If for whatever reason you can neither buy recovery disks from the manufacturer nor create your own disks then, as a last resort, you can purchase a full copy of Windows 7 for about $100.
   
   
3. One antivirus at a time, please.
   
   Two antivirus programs running concurrently is like pushing two fat pigs together through a dog door, neither can get through the door correctly and they block each other from functioning properly.
   
   Two antivirus or security programs can tear nasty holes in your operating system depending on which ones you are trying to combine (I have seen it!) or at least they will SLOW DOWN YOUR COMPUTER TO A CRAWL because two systems are trying to scan your every move as well as each others moves.
   
   More than one antivirus or security program running concurrently is usually LESS protection than one good one.
   
   Your new computer most likely came with a trial of some sort of “security” software pre-installed. All these pre-installed antivirus or security programs will cost money, every year! Remove this stuff because you don’t need to pay for a good antivirus program!
   
   Remove the “old” antivirus program before installing a new one; even if they are expired they will get in each other‘s way! And some of them don’t even uninstall correctly. I have uninstalled Norton, McAfee and other security programs and upon detailed inspection found some left over parts of these systems still sitting in and actually running on the computer. This inspection is not trivial at all; it takes very special programs and a lot of detailed know how to do it correctly.
   
   Install the free program Microsoft Security Essentials; you can read here how to do that correctly.
   
   
4. Do not install any tool bars. 
    Did you hear me?  Please DO NOT INSTALL ANY TOOL BARS!
   
   ALL toolbars are bloatware, they will slow down your internet connection and eventually even crash your web browser.
   
   You don't need any of them, no matter how well known the company is that wants to force the tool bar on your computer!
   
   Tool bars take up screen space and they will end up affecting performance and sometimes even security. 
   
   Please DO NOT INSTALL ANY TOOL BARS!
   
   
5. "Free" stuff can be expensive:
   
   Web sites that offer free games, movies, music (torrent sites!), pornography and even free social networking sites are riddled with viruses. Virus removal can be time and thus $$ consuming.
   
   Viruses are a software issue and are considered private data, they are not covered by any manufacturer warranty.
   
   Be safe and smart on the internet, use common sense and be vigilant.
   
   Keep your important software up to date; read more details about updating here.
   
   
6. Despite everything said in paragraph #5 above: Excellent free software is available for almost any functionality you can imagine and I can point you in the correct direction, I can show you where to find it.
    
7. Computers don’t like liquids.
   
   This includes water, coke, beer, soup, bodily fluids and excessive and/or aggressive cleaners.
   
   Don't spray screen cleaners directly on your screen, spray it on your lint free cleaning cloth and then wipe the screen. Even a mist of any liquid can cause damage.
   
   Computers also don’t like gravity or being punched. Throwing or punching a computer  will probably cause a lot more damage and not fix any issue, be it speed or erratic behavior.
   
   
8. No computer is immortal.
   
   Computer technology changes at an extremely fast rate. Average computer life spans are mere 2-3 years for laptops or closer to 4-5 years for desktop computers. This makes sense, because laptops undergo more stress from movement, impact and temperature changes. Many laptops are prone to overheating if you have them sitting “just” on your lap, on a table cloth(!) or on a pillow. NEVER EVER do that, always have your notebook computer on a solid, even surface like wooden tabletop, a counter top or a board.
   
   Your computer uses electricity that circulates through lots of electronic components that in turn can get really hot. Many portable computers eventually burn out. And if you have your data backed up, you'll be up and running on a new computer in no time.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

Virus Check Any File

Today a customer told me that she actually reads this blog and that she would like to see something about virus-checking any given file. Thank you Rose K. for reading this blog and for the suggestion.

I can think of many scenarios where you have a file, any kind of file, that you feel you better check for viruses before you "work" with it. And you may want something like a "majority vote" because just the other day you read in the newspaper that scary article saying that one anti virus program may not be enough to know "the truth".

As with increasingly many things around computers the Internet can help with a service that will allow you to upload any file up to a size of 20MB; this service then will submit your file to currently 40 (forty!) different anti-virus programs and give you the results.

This free service is called VirusTotal. Here is a partial screenshot of  an example output:

When you click on the Show All button the list gets much, much longer.

In the Result column on the far right you see what every anti-virus program says about the file. No entry here means that the AV program does not qualify the file as containing a virus.

Yes, above mentioned newspaper article is technically correct, one vote is not enough to really matter. But when only 5 of 40 results mark the file as virus infected you can with some degree of reliability assume that these five positive results may be so called "false positives". 

A word of warning: I can imagine that only a few AV programs mark a file as infected while the majority does not and the file actually contains a brand new virus that the majority of AV programs can not yet detect! Depending on the circumstances you may react super carefully rather than too trusting.

Again another good example that computer safety benefits from an open mind, common sense, a good measure of caution and careful consideration of all aspects of the given situation.

The only problem with common sense seems to be that it ain't that common..

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

Siteadvisor Incompatible With Firefox 5

Currently I get many questions about McAfee Siteadvisor not working in Firefox.

If you have updated to Firefox 5.0 nobody can help you but McAfee; their Siteadvisor is not compatible with the new version of Firefox anymore.

An excellent example how a big company, here McAfee, ruins an originally outstanding utility and makes it unusable.

An IMHO decent replacement would be Web Of Trust, WOT for short. You can check out WOT here. Please read the descriptions first!

If you want to install WOT please uninstall/remove Siteadvisor first. Here is how:

1. Open the Control Panel
2. In XP open Add/Remove Programs, in Vista or Win 7 open Programs and Features
3. Find and highlight McAfee Siteadisor
4. In XP click Remove, in Vista or Win 7 click Uninstall

Then you can install WOT from within Firefox.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

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Remarks on Security Suites

 

In the paid version of the Windows Secrets blog I read an article; among others it talks about an anti virus suite causing horribly long boot times. Due to the rules and organization of this blog I can not link directly to this part of the article. So I quote the relevant pieces here.

To set the stage: Generally I recommend to remove all those big, cumbersome and expensive security suites like McAfee, Norton, Trend Micro and so on. When I try to get the customer’s permission for this the most common question I encounter all too often is “Why?”. Here are some of the many more relevant answers, as I said above quoted from an article in the paid version of the Windows Secrets blog.

Feature duplication: 

For example, Trend Micro lists 13 major features and subsystems in its security suite, McAfee lists 14, and Symantec lists 33!

Many of these features duplicate abilities already built into Windows and the major browsers. For example, Internet Explorer and Firefox have built-in link-checkers, pop-up-blockers, parental controls, and more.

Windows itself (especially Win7) has a capable firewall built in.

Overhead:

So the large security suites are including features you probably already have, and all of these redundant features consume memory and CPU time.

Solution:

… my current favorite security tool, Microsoft's free Security Essentials (site), lists just two major functions: antivirus and anti-malware protection.

When used with Windows' built-in firewalls and a fully current browser (say, IE8 or Firefox 3.6.x), you end up with essentially the same capabilities provided by the huge commercial security suites.

Price:

What's even better, it's all free!

I hope this is enough to convince even those people that say “But I paid for it”.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

McAfee Siteadvisor Setup

McAfee seems to feel the heat, maybe generated by Microsoft Security Essentials?

McAfee’s IMHO very valuable Siteadisor service is increasingly being used to run with settings that help only McAfee and not the unsuspecting end user.

Here is a short tutorial on how I would set Siteadvisor’s options. This is based on the currently latest version of Siteadisor.

Click on the little vertical arrow to the right of the green (or grey) McAfee icon in the right bottom corner of the Firefox window. 








Then click on Options and in the General tab set “Add color-coded highlighting…” to Yes.

In the Secure Search tab Un-check the check box by “Add Secure Search to…”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I strongly suggest NOT to set Yahoo as the browser’s home page and NOT to use McAfee’s so called Secure Search as your browser’s default search engine.

Update July 18, 2010:

Just this moment I had to do remote support to help a customer who did not see the McAfee icon in the right bottom corner of the Firefox screen.

1.   The status bar was turned off. Naturally you can’t see something that is being displayed there if the status bar is turned off. You turn it on here:

2.   Almost every add-on in Firefox can be independently disabled or enabled. In this customer’s Firefox the McAfee Siteadvisor add-on was disabled. You can check and/or change that by clicking Tools, Add-ons. You get a window like this:
Highlight Extensions and find McAfee Siteadvisor. If the marked button reads Enable then it is disabled; click on Enable to do just that. You have to restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

End of Update July 18, 2010 

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

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