CCR's Bi-Monthly
Newsletter
January 15th, 2010
In This Issue:
Where Does Spam Come From?
Google Quitting China?
Visit our new Youtube channel - click here.
A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. -
Carl Reiner
The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it. -
Patrick Young
The problem with most winter sports is, follow me closely here, they take place in the winter. -
Dave Barry
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else. -
Will Rogers
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -
Wernher Von Braun |
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502-637-4551
info@recyclelouisville.com
1361 S 15th St
Louisville, KY 40210
www.recyclelouisville.com
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| Where Does Spam Come From? Or, Why Does My Computer Keep Asking For Brains? |
Where does Spam come from? Do you picture nefarious characters hunched over their keyboards, sending hundreds and hundreds of emails every day, giggling maniacally at the thought of filling your inbox with ads for "freee canadienne dr*gs"? Well, they may be giggling, but they aren't hunched over their computers - they'd rather use your computer instead.
Back in the early, unsophisticated days, spammers would set up their mail server somewhere on the internet and just blast as many people as they could as fast as they could. They knew it was only a matter of time until the spam was tracked back their IP address and the mail server was blocked, so it was purely a volume game. Until some clever spammer invented the botnet - and zombie computers were born.
A bot is a very small program - technically a type of malware - that allows its creator to control the computers it has infected. Unlike viruses which can cause PC crashes, a bot is designed to run without the user noticing anything is wrong with his PC; because the idea is not to cause problems with the PC, but to use it for all sorts of nefarious activities.
Once a PC is infected, it becomes a "zombie" -and all the "zombie" PCs infected with the bot are collectively called a "botnet". Now our spammer isn't sitting there with his email server that only works for a short time before being blocked - he has thousands of computers under his command. And we do mean thousands - one of the largest botnets out there right now is the "Storm" botnet, which has been confirmed to consist of at least 390,000 infected computers. Now he doesn’t need a server at all - his spam comes from thousands of perfectly legitimate office and home PCs around the world - they send his spam email in the background, completely hidden from their actual users.
So what do you do to keep yourself safe? How do you make sure your PC isn't a zombie? It’s actually not that hard - just follow some simple rules:
1) Have a good antivirus package on your PC and keep it up to date. For businesses, that means using a good commercial package from a vendor with a good reputation, like Symantec or Trend Micro. For the home user, you can use a commercial product, but there are plenty of programs like AVG or Avast that are free for home use and give excellent protection.
2) It's been said before, but I’ll say it again - do not open email attachments from people you don’t know. In fact, some of the more sophisticated bots and worms out there now will "spoof", or attach a fake address in the "from" field to their fake emails using the name of someone in your address book. So it's even better to stay away from opening attachments at all unless you know exactly what they are. And a good antivirus package will stop infected ones from opening anyway.
3) Watch for odd behavior in the data paths to and from your PC. Has your internet connection suddenly slowed dramatically? Does it take forever to send or recieve email? Has your internet service provider notified you they are seeing lots of traffic from your PC? These can all be signs your PC is doing things behind your back - and has become a zombie.
4) For even more security (and a nice method for removing many of those annoying ads from the internet) you can use a hosts blacklist file. The most popular on is MVPS. This creates a blacklist in your PC's hosts file that automatically blocks many known ad servers and sources of viruses and malware.
Until next time, surf safely and remember if your PC starts asking for "“brains…must have brains…" – now you know what the problem is. |
Visit Our New Youtube Channel
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We make lots of ads here at CCR - lots of very bad ads. To see some of them, visit our new Youtube channel at www.youtube.com/commonwealthcomputer. |
Google Quitting China? Yet Another Reason To Keep Ewaste Out. |
After a string of recent cyber-attacks that Google claims originated from, or were at least coordinated by the Chinese government, Google has announced that it will not continue censoring search results on its China portals and may pull its business operations out of China entirely (ZDNet has a good roundup of up-to-the-minute links here). Google appears to have good evidence that this was a coordinated attack, as the US State Department is expected to issue a formal diplomatic complaint to China regarding the attacks next week.
This is yet another reminder that, over and above the horrific environmental abuses that China engages in with the e-waste it receives, that there is absolutely no guarantee that any data-bearing device going to China will be secure. Again, we encourage all of our clients to stick with reputable domestic recyclers. |
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