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How Can I spot a hoax email or fake offer ?

Hoax Virus Alerts

There are a lot of viruses out there. But some aren’t really out there at all. Virus hoaxes are more than mere annoyances, as they may lead some users to routinely ignore all virus warning messages, leaving them vulnerable to a genuine, destructive virus. Or more worrying some of these hoax attache fake fixes which are viruses themselves or ask the user to do something like delete a file.

These are e-mail messages either warning the recipient of an impending virus or other disaster, or promises the recipient of some reward if he or she would only “forward the message to everybody they know”. In most cases, there is no basis to these warnings/give-aways, and the message itself becomes a type of “virus” as each person replicates and passes on the message, and each of those people replicates it and passes it on, etc., etc., etc. Most antivirus programs are not designed to detect hoaxes since they do not attempt to replicate or damage systems on their own (they just depend on the individual to do that for them!).

If the message tells you to do something, especially if that something involves changing in your account or sending a file or message over the network, **CHECK WITH SOMEONE KNOWLEDGEABLE THAT YOU CAN TRUST**. Imagine you received a package to your house asking you to place your house keys in the return envelope provided, and mail them to a post office box. Would you comply? People fall for the computer version of this all the time.

If you are not sure then copy some text from the email and place it in a search engine the results will normally give you a good indication if it is a hoax. Or you could visit a page like Symantecs Hoax Page and see if you see the name of your fake virus on the list.

“Forward This message to get a free …. !”

Many hoaxes encourage their victims to forward a message to as many people as possible in order to get a reward for themselves or on the behalf of some charity. The hoax claims that if enough copies of the message get sent then something good will happen. Alternatively, some messages claim that unless enough messages are sent, than something bad will happen. The thing to know is that there is no way for anyone to count the number of copies of an email in circulation on the internet, nor to count the number of times something has been forwarded.

A chain letter is a “get rich quick” scheme that promises that your post box will soon be stuffed full of cash if you decide to participate. You’re told you can make thousands of pounds every month if you follow the detailed instructions in the letter. The main thing to remember is that a chain letter is simply a bad investment. You certainly won’t get rich. You will receive little or no money.

There are enough myths, legends, and hoaxes on the net to fill a book, in fact, one is growing, check out urban legends.com

So Remeber Don’t forward the Email, Microsoft, Disney The GAP, VIctoria’s Secret etc, are not giving away stuff for free. They are not going to tax modems or the internet. They are not going to ban religious stations either. No kids need your email as last wish or to save their lives. Nobody wakes up in a tub of ice with his kidneys stolen and Nope, you are not getting the secret recipe for a corporate giant’s product.

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How Can I Prevent My Computer From Being Hacked?

Although no system is 100% safe from outside intruders you can minimize the risk. The best way to protect against hackers is to use a firewall program. As well as some self help.

Here are the steps I would advise following

• Dont choose easy passwords such as your name
• Change your passwords on a regular basis
• Do not leave your passwords and credit card information lying around
• Turn off preview pane in your email program
• Only download from trusted sources
• Scan all CD-Rom’s Floppys,usb devices, email attachments before use.
• Keep your firewall and anitvirus program up-to-date
• If your computer is not on a network then Disable file and print sharing on in the network options panel
• Educate other computer users on the use of firewalls.

If running a network or a computer with sensitive or confidential data on it consider using Vulnerability-testing software which checks many of the same things a security consultant would automatically at a lower cost. Its also worth remembering in a corporate enviroment most attacks and data thefts actually come from someone within the company or a ex employee than from the outside world. To this effect make sure users are only give the level of access required to do their job.

If you are on a Windows machine it is also important to update security patches and service packs from Microsoft. Keeping up to date with service packs and security patches will help you build a more secure computing environment.

Think of firewalls as gatekeepers. All messages coming in or going out are carefully screened to meet certain select security criteria. When installed, a firewall exists between your computer(s) and the Internet. The firewall lets you request web pages, download files, chat, etc. while making sure other people on the internet can not access services on your computer like file or print sharing. Some firewalls are pieces of software that run on your computer. Other firewalls are built into hardware and protect your whole network from attacks.

ZoneAlarm Pro is the award-winning personal firewall that automatically blocks known and unknown Internet threats, barricading your PC against hackers and data thieves. It’s easy to install and use, and comes with a year of free, automated product updates. Why risk it? Get protected. Even better Zone Alarms Home Edition is FREE

Or there’sBlackICE Defender is an industrial-strength anti-hacker system that delivers unmatched protection to your PC. It scans your DSL, cable modem, or dial-up Internet connection looking for hacker activity. When it detects an attempted intrusion, it automatically blocks traffic from that source, keeping intruders from accessing your system. there are many other firewalls this is just a brief intro.

Firewalls do not stop Viruses checkout protect against viruses

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What is Port Scanning?

Port Scanning has been talked about a lot over the years in magazines on in the Internet most users know its something bad but little else on what it actually is and what it does.

What Are Ports?

Most people know that the back of there computer has ports, your plug your mouse in to the mouse port for example. Hardware ports are the sockets you plug things in to like your printer, scanner, camera’s and USB devices. However what a lot of people don’t realise is that there thousands of software ports, these are the “channels” your computer system and programs use to communicate with each other. There are lots of standard port numbers so software vendors and users know which port to use for which function. For example if when your email program sends an email it talks to the server via port 25. When you typed in our website address the request to the websever to retrive the site for you was sent via port 80. All together there are 65535 port numbers that can be used

What is Port Scanning?

Port Scanning is basically a hackers way of searching machines connected to the Internet to find a way in to a machine via a port that is unsecured (or open). Network Administrators and Security Specialist also use port scanning to check for vulnerability in there network or programs so they can close off the vulnerability before its found by a malicious user.

How does Port Scanning Work?

The port scanning program sends some data to each port it is testing to check for a response. In simple terms its like someone knocking on all the doors and windows of your house to see what response they get.

The response they get is usually one of three following things

• Open Response – This tells the hacker that this port is open and the service is listening
• Closed Response – This tells the hacker that this port exists but no connections to it are allowed
• Dropped or Blocked – This tells the hacker nothing no response nothing exists on the port

From this you can probably tell that the malicious user is looking for open ports so they can try and remotely connect to the machine for many reasons which could include drop a virus or trojan, steal some confidential information, take control of the machine for malicious reasons. Many exploits use something called buffer overflow when an open port is found. However as mentioned above there are also legitimate reasons for port scanning.

How To prevent Port Scanning?

Rather than prevent port scanning as this is something you as the end use has little control over you want to make sure your machine is not telling any port scanner it has open doors. Looking at the responses and thinking of it again in terms of your house, if a burglar came to your house and found and open door great – if he finds a door that is closed – that may well deter him but he may come back at a later time to see if the door has been left open. However if he came to you house and couldn’t find any doors then he will not be interested in come back later. So we make sure our computer has no open doors by using something called a Firewall.

This basically acts as a barrier between your computer and the Internet only allowing programs and communications you have authorised through the wall to your computer and keeping any others out. In short it places your computer in stealth mode as far as port scanning is concerned. Having a firewall is a must, windows XP service pack 2 has one as standard although its not as good as many on the market it better than nothing. We would recommend using a separate firewall like Norton’s Internet Security System or MacAfee’s or better still ZoneAlarm which has an excellent free version you can download and use.

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What is a Trojan?

According to legend, the Greeks won the Trojan war by hiding in a huge, hollow wooden horse to get into the fortified city of Troy. In today’s computer world, a Trojan horse is defined as a “malicious, security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign” such as a screen saver, game.

Trojan horses are the most destructive and dangerous species of computer viruses. Most of them are resident stealth viruses, which means that they are constantly in the memory of your PC and can not be detected using common ways.

Files attached to your email and files you download from the internet are easiest way to become infected. Any file you download can contain a trojan.

When opened, it would unleash a slew of problems, such as sending itself to everybody on your email address book or IRC channel, erasing or modifying your files, and downloading another Trojan horse program designed to steal your passwords. Many Trojan horses also allow crackers (aka “hackers”) to take over your computer and “remote control” it, such as to take over your IRC channels or use your computer to perform denial of service attacks like those that disrupted web sites of Yahoo and Amazon.

When the infamous Back Orifice 2000 is installed on a Windows-based computer, the computer can be remotely controlled by another user. Although remote control software is not malicious in and of itself, Back Orifice 2000 is intended to be used for malicious purposes, and includes stealth behavior that has no purpose other than to make detection of the program difficult.

The remote user will be able to read, write, delete and transfer files to and from the affected machine. If they use a plug-in supplied with Back Orifice 2000 they will be able to see what is on the screen of the affected machine and also take control of the mouse and keyboard. The affected machine can also be configured to be an HTTP file server allowing anyone with a web browser to transfer files to and from it.

The remote user could have made changes to your system, including but not limited to the following:

o Stealing or changing passwords or password files
o Installing remote-connectivity host software, also known as backdoors
o Installing keystroke logging software
o Configuring of firewall rules
o Stealing of credit card numbers, banking information, personal data, and so on
o Deletion or modification of files
o Sending inappropriate or even incriminating material from a users email account
o Modifying access rights on user accounts or files
o Deleting information from log files to hide such activities

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What is a Hacker and Cracker?

This is an ongoing debate and really the answer depends on who you ask. In general terms, a hacker is an “enthusiastic programmer”, and likes to “perfect technologies”. A hacker is a very productive person. They are some of the main producers of freeware found online. The hacker usually attempts to do something in the quickest and easiest way possible, – i.e. the quick and dirty way – even if it makes no sense to others, or doesn’t follow the rules. If it works, that is all that counts. Hackers like to find shortcuts. They do not like to conform to standards, and like to be different from others. In other words, they like to do things their own way, no matter how much criticism they may encounter; and they are proud of the short cuts or discoveries that they find and successfully use.

Many people confuse the term hacker with the term cracker. In fact, a hacker does not have a specific purpose or goal in mind when he/she is hacking. The hacker hacks mainly for fun or entertainment, or to play a joke, in a playful manner; whereas, the cracker has malicious intent. The cracker’s main purpose is to make life difficult for others by breaking into computer systems to steal passwords or valuable information, or to create disturbances in these systems.

Crackers pride themselves on their ability to create havoc to other users, and do not care how many people they affect.

Confused here is another explanation: crackers are those who give hackers a bad name (because most of the people cannot distinguish the two). Somebody who breaks into other’s computer systems, or digs into their code (in order to make a copy-protected program run, for example) is a cracker. Then, someone who’s really good at what he does with computers, is called a hacker. A hack, in software circles, is a quickly written short piece of code that makes something work. It may not be beautiful to look at, but it makes things function.

So, really, the definition of a hacker does not refer to whether someone uses his knowledge to break into a network for good or bad reasons, but if the person sought knowledge just for the joy of seeking, or whether he sought knowledge only to use it.

You also get terms like “White Hat” and “Black Hat” there are commanly defined as:

“…white hat describes a hacker (or, if you prefer, a cracker) who identifies a security weakness in a computer system or network but, instead of taking malicious advantage of it, exposes the weakness in a way that will allow the system’s owners to fix the breach before it is can be taken advantage by others (such as black hat hackers.) Methods of telling the owners about it range from a simple phone call through sending an e-mail note to a Webmaster or administrator all the way to leaving an electronic “calling card” in the system that makes it obvious that security has been breached.

While white hat hacking is a hobby for some, others provide their services for a fee. Thus, a white hat hacker may work as a consultant or be a permanent employee on a company’s payroll. A good many white hat hackers are former black hat hackers.”

“…The black hat hacker takes advantage of the break-in, perhaps destroying files or stealing data for some future purpose. The black hat hacker may also make the exploit known to other hackers and/or the public without notifying the victim. This gives others the opportunity to exploit the vulnerability before the organization is able to secure it.”

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Nowadays it is crucial that your computer has an antivirus program on and is kept up-to-date this will help catch and contain the majority of viruses trying to infect your computer. Sometimes virus or malicious code can infect your machine due to a security hole found in your operating system or program on your machine.

Do help prevent this its is important you go to microsoft’s update page and download any newly released security updates. You can also from that page enable automatic updates so you do not have to remember to check for any new security patches as your computer will do this for you. However no software is 100% guaranteed so you also need to take some precautions, make sure you back up any files or data so if the worst should happen you have not lost any thing critical or important to you.

Be careful of any attachments you receive by email as this is still the primary way viruses are spread over the internet. Another important safety precaution is to scan any CD’s floppy disk or USB storage devices as soon as you place or attach them to your computer, especially if they have been used on another computer which may be infected without you knowing.

To protect your computer from infection follow the following points:

• Back up critical files on a regular basis
• Visit Microsoft Update and turn on Automatic Updates.
• Install a good antivirus software and keep it current.
• Use a firewall on your computer
• Never open an e-mail attachment from someone you don’t know
• Be aware attachments from someone you do know may be infected without there knowledge always save and scan before opening.

How do you know if your Computer has a Virus?

Ok one of the questions I get asked all the time is – “Does my computer have a virus” and “how can I tell if my computer has a virus”. Perhaps you’ve noticed some different behavior when using your computer and your can’t think of anything you have installed or changed lately that may have caused this.

First thing’s first if you haven’t already download an antivirus program and run it to see if it picks anything up – if your antivirus has stopped working (if you haven’t kept it up to date some viruses are programmed to render your software useless). You can go to a website if your still able to connect and scan your pc from there both symantec and house doctor provide online scans which are very useful to be sure. Not all signs of virus infections are easy to spot but there are some common virus indicators noted below.

Signs your machine is infected with a virus

• Your machine is crashing and restarting every few minutes
• Your computer is running a lot slower than normal
• You notice your computer almost grinds to a halt within minutes of connecting to the Internet
• Your computer freezes, locks up or stops responding often
• Programs are not working or menus and boxes are distorted
• You can not access disk drives that you could before
• Strange Error messages are appearing
• When connected to the internet or a network you notice a lot of activity from your hard drive not caused by anything you are doing. (for example you have nothing running yet your hard drive of connection is thrashing)

*note although the above are common indications that your machine could be infected these symptoms can also been seen if your machine has spy ware on it or it could be due to a hardware or software problem which is not related to a virus infection. Read How To Remove a Virus Here

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A worm is a virus that uses open (insecure) computers or known security bugs to gain access to a machine. A worm is a self-replicating program like a virus. However, unlike a virus, a worm does not infect other programs.

Worms are generally embedded in programs or attachments to email messages. When the user opens the file, the work begins a two-part attack on the system. First, the worm performs its damage, such as destroying files, corrupting programs or damaging the operating system. Then, the virus uses a process known as replication to transmit itself to everyone in the infected user’s email address book. If the computer is not on the internet at the time, then the transmission could be stopped; however, with the increasing number of users who have ‘always-on’ connections via DSL or cable-modems, the worm is usually able to transmit itself to thousands of unsuspecting recipients in a flash!

Worms can also infect Microsoft’s Active-X and Sun’s Java script controls, which means that worms can be embedded in web pages and launch themselves upon visitors who simply visit the site and view the web page! While this has rarely occurred to date, it is a distinct possibility in the future that simply browsing the web could be very dangerous without adequate antivirus protection!

The scariest part of worm attacks is that they are usually invisible to the infected user. Worms work silently in the background, and if they do not actually damage obvious files in the user’s computer, they go undetected for a long time while they continue to transmit themselves to recipients via email.

There are many Infamous worms i.e. The Anna Kournikova Worm, I love you worm, Code Red. or Nimda which is reputed to be the worst to date. Nimda was released on September 18, 2001

The Nimda worm has the potential to affect both user workstations (clients) running Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, or 2000 and servers running Windows NT and 2000. It spreads via email, network shares and websites. Its main goal is simply to spread over the Internet and Intranet, infecting as many users as possible and creating so much traffic that networks are virtually unusable. It may also take up a large amount of space on your hard drive.

The email messages created by the worm contain an attachment that can be executed even if the user does not open it and without the user’s knowledge. It infects HTML documents. When the infected documents are accessed (locally or remotely), the machine viewing the page is infected. When the virus finds an open share, it copies itself to each folder on the drive in .EML format. This can include the START UP folder.

The worm scans IP addresses looking for IIS servers to infect via the Web Folder Transversal vulnerability. It tries to use the backdoor created by W32/CodeRed.c to infect. It adds worm code to .EXE files. Email addresses are gathered by extracting the email addresses from MAPI messages in Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express, as well as from HTM and HMTL documents. Once infected, your system is used to seek out others to infect over the web. As this creates a lot of port scanning, this can cause a network traffic jam.

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A file virus (also called Program Virus) is a type of virus which inserts itself into, or associates itself with a file. They only infect files that can be executed. This includes, but is not limited to: .EXE .COM and .DOT files. File viruses can be further divided into:

• Parasitic Viruses
• Overwriting Viruses
• Companion Viruses
• Linking Viruses

Parasitic Viruses

A parasitic virus attaches itself to a file in order to propagate. It generally keeps most of the file intact and either add itself to the start (prepending viruses) or end of the file (appending viruses). COM and EXE files are easiest to infect, as they are simply loaded directly into memory and execution always starts at the first instruction.

Overwriting Viruses

Most viruses are careful not to destroy the infected file, but overwriting viruses overwrite part of the infected file, so that it will no longer operate. However, this makes these viruses extremely obvious, so they are unlikely to spread far.

Companion Viruses

If you try to run a program without specifying a file extension, the system will always try to find and execute the .COM program first and if it cannot be located then .EXE file will be called next. Companion viruses make use of this to provide an infection mechanism which does not modify the original file in any way. These viruses only infects .EXE files and do so by writing a companion .COM file with the same name. Then, when the user runs an infected program, the .COM file containing the virus is run. It looks for another .EXE file to infect, then loads the requested .EXE file and runs it.

Linking Viruses

These infect programs by changing information in the directory structure and modifying the file pointers, so every infected program starts at the same location (usually the last cluster on the disk) which contains virus code. Cleaning disks infected with a link virus requires a specific approach.

Each of the above file viruses can incorporate different techniques to improve the infection rate or to avoid detection

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