.Net Geek

In this fast paced IT world things are getting smaller, faster and better. Take the example of a pen drive. It’s now an essential component that one techie should have in widget list. So do I, but lately I have stopped using them as they are most vulnerable to a virus or worm. You can make sure that there is no one unwanted living in your hard drives but what about other’s PC, they can have viruses. And I really don’t want that my computer get affected with these things because of a pen drive which is used frequently between various devices for data transfer. Antivirus does help to some extent but seriously I cannot rely on them when it comes on my data security. What make things worst is that a pen drive execute (Autoplay) automatically when inserted into a PC. So here are my few suggestion for all to make sure things don’t run ugly when you use a pen drive.

• Make sure what are copying from a source computer. Try to copy individual files instead of a folder at once. When copying a folder it also copies the hidden content in it which is useless to you and may contain some hidden programs.
• Always copies from a secured network or computer. Source should be trusted and secured with an antivirus. Before copying it is a good idea to confirm with the owner (may be from your friend/colleague) of device if it is virus free.
• Most important, disable the Autoplay on all drives on your PC. To do this follow 1,2,3 –

1. 1. Go to start> run> type gpedit.msc
   2. Select ‘computer configuration’ from the left tree and then go to ->’administrative tempates’->’system’.
   3. In the right panel look for ‘Turn off Autoplay’, Double click on it and Select ‘enabled’ and then select ‘all drives’.

This will disable the auto-play of pen drive when you insert it in the PC. Most viruses attach them with the auto-play program and run automatically unknowingly. So the above steps make you little closure to the secure data transfer to your PC.

Last but not least, you should have an updated antivirus guarding your PC all time.

Happy Tweaking!

SpamPoison is a small but useful utility to fight against spammers. It won’t directly help you in bringing down spam in your blog/Inbox but will stop spammers harvesting information which they can use for sending spam emails. Spammers usually get email addresses with the help of Bots. Bots (also known as wanderers, spiders or crawlers) crawls a web page and continually retrieving linked pages for extracting any email like string and store it in a database. Certainly this database is further used for sending spam emails using mass mailer software. Spam poison identifies these spammer’s crawlers and feed them through an infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses. All you have to do is link back this page so that whenever a spammer’s robot scans your page, it will be sucked into this one. To link to this page, just use this simple code:

<a href="http://english-130430879095.spampoison.com">Fight Spam! Click Here!</a>

Gmail CAPTCHA is cracked by a group of spammers, first reported by a security firm “Websense”. The firm believes that this attack is carried out by the same group behind the cracking of Windows Live mail CAPTCHA’s earlier this month. Here is full story on blog of this security firm.

Recently, my site is put on warning by the Google. What I mean by put on warning is that when people search my site on Google, result lead to a warning page of Google instead of the targeted page of my site. The warning page of Google said that there is a badware/malware on my site. Google also suggest visiting stopbadware.org for more information. As shown in the pictures below

I have been experienced some delay in opening the home page, even sometime my I.E crashed. But I never thought that this could be due to some hack that had already taken over my website. It was only just two days, even before I could go deep into the details of error, When finally I got this mail from Google stating that they have identified my site as that one who distribute malware or badware. Now I found that some hack have happened to my site. It is trying to download some plug-in in background that is off course not from my domain. So I decided to redirect the user of my site to a maintenance page so that I can peep hard into the source code and do the cleaning stuff. Even I have tried deleting all blog entries and comments. But, I got no success finding malicious script/code.  Luckily, I have taken the full backup of my site few days back. So I deleted all current pages and uploaded the backup. It works fine.

Anyway this is the time for me to act fast as traffic of site has taken a plunge. It has gone down by 90%. I fear that Google may drop my pages from its index. This is killing me in frustration. However, I have sorted out the problem but Google yet to do a review on my site. It is necessary to remove that nasty warning message. I have made a Review Request on Google and Stopbadware and keeping my finger crossed. I hope Google and Stopbadware will remove my site from their defaulter list.

Probably, this could be a code insertion hack, some third-party supplied advertising may contain links to badware, or the server hacks may have resulted in the insertion of code onto the site’s webpage.

Stopbadware.org published some security tips – http://stopbadware.org/home/security

StopBadware discussion group – http://groups.google.com/group/stopbadware