Microsoft Security Essentials – Excellent Free Antivirus Solution
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It appears that today is anti-malware-day on kkomp.com: So I’ve written a bonus article, because I really do recommend that you use this free software: - As you may or may not know, I’ve been plagued with viruses over the last few days. Fortunately the infection has now been dealt with; thanks to Microsoft Security Essentials. When I became infected, my antivirus solution provided by Avast! simply didn’t see it. Malwarebytes was oblivious to it also. – Yet there was definitely an infection, as my system was spewing out spam emails to all on my contacts-list, as well as to non-existent addresses that the worm was probing by creating the address itself and seeing if the mail was delivered. AdAware from Lavasoft managed to find a keylogger, a backdoor Trojan, and the worm itself. I thought that the problem was sorted at that point, and went merrily on my way singing joyfully and blogging crazily. The following day I activated my email client, then switched on the 64-bit box, as well as the external hard-drive. My email inbox was soon swamped by hundreds of “Message Undeliverable” emails. The worm was back!
How? I cleaned both boxes with AdAware, I formatted the external hard-drive, including all the backups, and made a fresh backup. Nevertheless I did it all again, and the system stopped sending spam. I ran 4 different programs on all drives of both machines. All reported that the system was clean. Imagine my horror when two days later the system started sending spam again! I’d recently been reading an article on PC Mech.com, entitled “Free Anti-Virus From Microsoft Is Now Available”. This gave me an idea: Microsoft earlier dropped its Windows One-Care program, and promised to replace it with something a bit lighter. This was the promised product; just out of beta. My thinking started to run along the lines of: “Well it’s a new antivirus solution, it’s from Microsoft, it works with Windows 7 64-bit as well as with Windows XP 32-bit; both of which I run, and it’s best of all FREE, which means that it won’t hurt to give it a try. – There’s definitely a problem somewhere on my system that everything I’ve tried so far is missing; so let’s give it a whirl.” I isolated the box running XP 32-bit, removed Avast! free-edition from it, and installed Microsoft Security Essentials. I set it to auto scan in 1/2-hour . To cut a long story short it found 4 pieces of malware, which it rated as a severe threat, and removed them. Upon reconnection; after I’d isolated the Windows 7 box, having installed Microsoft Security Essential on it, no spam. Yay! I ran it on the 64-bit Windows 7 box. – It found the culprits: Two instances of Trojan downloaders: ASX.Winmad.AN, and ASX.Winmad.CJ. It deleted the infected files, which had been downloading various malware infections and distributing them over my LAN. – Target neutralised: I’m now virus free.
I can’t speak too highly of Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s a glowingly-excellent piece of software from the softies. Microsoft Security Essentials was the only free antivirus solution that was able to both see and clear the entire virus-infection and fully clean my system. Most other solutions couldn’t see any infection at all, and those that did didn’t get to the root of the issue. Microsoft Security Essentials, however, did the business and completely solved the problem. After that glowing report, let’s get back to reality with the nitty-gritty: - Microsoft Security Essentials is extremely thorough: On its default setting it scans everything, and I mean everything. It looks inside zipped archives; personal, program, and system archives, byte by byte: .CAB files and the like are no longer safe places for malware to hide. If it does then it will die by being detected and eradicated bit-by-bit. Being so thorough; there are obviously limiting factors. The first of these is time: Microsoft Security Essentials is fast; there’s no doubt about that, but it does so much work that it’s no faster than any other antivirus solution of a similar type. I found that on my box running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 3-core AMD Phenom CPU running at 2.3GHz and 8GBs DDR2 800MHz RAM, Microsoft Security Essentials managed to scan about 50 GBs of data an hour.
The second is heat: With such a colossal amount of calculations being processed at a quite incredible speed, the processor would have a lot of work to do, and therefore produce heat. This antivirus solution, running a full scan, is no laughing matter. I have a feeling that a single-cored processor of 1.8GHz or less would have problems with it. Indeed, from personal experience, I had a lot of programs running at the same time as the full-scan was happening on my AMD Athlon 64×2-powered box, running 32-bit XP Professional at 2.3GHz with 2GBs DDR2 667MHz RAM, and the processor usage went so high for so long that the thermal-trip shut the CPU down before it fried. Running Microsoft Security Essentials on its own caused no such problem though, and the scan was slower than on the 3-core Phenom, but totally effective nevertheless. As you’ll see from the white CPU-usage graph in the top-left corner of the picture of the readout from Glint system monitor, above, the processor usage can be quite large. This readout was from the Athlon 64×2 XP box with only Microsoft Security Essentials running.
One other thing: If you’re running 64-bit XP; and that’s probably not a lot of you, as 64-bit XP can be a nightmare as far as drivers are concerned, there’s no version of Microsoft Security Essentials for your operating system. Microsoft Security Essentials has versions for 32-bit XP, 32-bit Vista and Windows 7, and 64-bit Vista and Windows 7. Have you tried out Microsoft Security Essentials yet? If so then what do you think of it? |
Conficker Kicks In
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The Conficker worm, in an attempt to take the internet community by surprise, has recently activated on an unexpected date and has “phoned home” from infected computers to get some malicious payload of scare ware installed on those computers.
The scare ware is fake anti-virus software that “finds” infections on the infected machine and asks the user to pay $49.95 to get rid of them. I don’t know if the user’s machine is actually infected with the malware that the bogus anti-virus finds before it is detected, or whether the malware program simply lies. – ‘Probably a bit of both. – And you can bet that any installed trojans and spyware that the Conficker distributors find it useful for your computer to stay infected with aren’t detected. Conficker exploits Windows vulnerabilities that have been patched for a while now. – So if you have Conficker on your machine and it’s working as intended, then you haven’t got the necessary patches from Microsoft. First we need to be more definite about whether or not your machine is infected. Go here to find out. – It’s fairly self-explanatory. If it appears that your machine is infected, download and run the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool. – That will kill the infection, plus several others if you have them. Now repair/re-download/update your anti-virus software as necessary, and run a manual scan. In future ensure that the latest patches from Microsoft are applied to your system as and when they are issued. This will avoid your computer becoming infected, and even if it should still become infected, the virus won’t be able to function and will be exterminated by the Malicious Software Removal Tool. |
It’s Life…But Not As We Know It-
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I was checking my email earlier when I saw an interesting article on a new type of social-network worm: “Security company ESET’s analysis of Win32/Inject.NBL reveals it to be an interesting piece of malware.” “This instant messaging-based bot has the following functions built into it:
In other words, it can download files, update itself, remove itself, and send messages through MSN Messenger, AIM and Triton, spreading itself on those networks. This is a nice chunk of functionality.” What next – A virus that decides whether it likes you or not? Are viruses becoming more intelligent? The first viruses were more an annoyance than anything else; soon to be followed by the destructive type of virus that lurks on your system undetected until its clock reaches zero-hour and it delivers harmful payloads that wreak havoc with your machine. Around the same time they were equipped with their own SMTP engines, enabling them to mail themselves as an attachment to a bogus email-message on the internet to any email addresses that they could find on the host machine…You know the story. Not long ago appeared the network-aware variety of virus that actively sought out unprotected paths in cyberspace to infest anything from individual computers to entire networks: The first signs of intelligence. Nowadays worms are infecting individual machines and adding them to a collective, using those collectives as botnets to launch mass DDOS attacks, send and relay spam and [illegal] porn. As computers develop in sophistication, will we one day see independent malevolent data-entities roaming the web, looking for a computer to possess and set up home in, like some form of information-based AI? In my opinion it’s not that far off being a future reality given the right circumstances. Could our computers eventually at a future date become a separate living collective entity – Life; but not as we know it? Maybe it’s already starting to happen? |
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Rotten Apple
Latest reports appear to indicate that Apple aren’t quite as bad as it seems; in fact it might appear at first sight that they had a windfall. That’s not exactly the case though: Despite news of their taking top customer-satisfaction honours among personal computer manufacturers, as released on Tuesday of this week, there are two things you should note before assuming that Apple are the tops and that this blog is heavily biased against them: Firstly nobody even thought to ask Kustom Komputa if they even wanted to be included in this award; probably because they knew Kustom Komputa would trounce Apple into second place. On a more serious note, though, the index measures results only for the three-month period ended in June – Before the crap began to hit the fan for Apple, starting with the release of the iPhone. Also on Tuesday; Apple admitted that a software update for their much troubled iPhone only partly fixes the connection problems it has had in connecting to 3G networks: In other words; honestly this time: “FAIL: We scratched again.” It has been reported that it isn’t only Apple’s buggy software that’s to blame: There have been reports that the Infineon Technologies 3G chipsets used in the iPhone are faulty. That could mean that no matter how good the software, the hardware issue might cause the problem to never totally go away. |
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It has been reported that it isn’t only Apple’s buggy software that’s to blame: There have been reports that the Infineon Technologies 3G chipsets used in the iPhone are faulty. That could mean that no matter how good the software, the hardware issue might cause the problem to never totally go away. The crap certainly has been hitting the fan lately for Apple; and maybe rightly so too: It seems that Steve Jobs has always been a bit of a dreamer; As reported here on kkomp.com; Apple were recently forced to extend the free trial of MobileMe in a face-saving operation. “We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make.” Said Apple. To me that sounds like: “We did it again by releasing a service well ahead of schedule in order to market before the competition: It wasn’t actually ready to be released; but we did so out of a case of having to. We hope we can eventually get it to work.” If they don’t it’ll end up costing them a few dollars more; which could incur the wrath of Jobsweh! In the same email Apple stated “We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour.” ROFLMAO – You’re telling me! What exactly has been Apple’s finest hour during the past two months? Steve Jobs seems to think he’s Apple’s answer to Bill Gates of late. The question is; is Jobsweh, the god with the bottomless pockets, fit to run Apple any longer? Should someone more competent and less greedy take over? |
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Fire Your Computer Technician!A computer technician spills the beans and makes available the knowledge he has charged clients hundreds in service fees for. |
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Social-Network Worm-Squirm
| Internet security firm Kaspersky have detected two new worms appearing from MySpace and Facebook which contain a payload which joins your machine to a botnet – and Kaspersky seem to think that the botnets will be used for a number of malicious purposes: DOS attacks? Hacking the Pentagon? Cheating at DOOM!!!? Who knows?
A few of the dodgy comments posted on MySpace and Facebook :- Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street
Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet
Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam
Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others. These comments lead on to a link to a bogus You-Tube clone, which asks you to download the latest Flash player; at which a file called “codecsetup.exe” – a network worm – downloads to the victim’s machine. |
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Kaspersky said its security suite detected the threats proactively and signatures were added to the database on July 31, 2008. Always remember to keep your Windows machine fully patched, your anti-virus updated, and be careful of allowing executables to download to your machine: If you suspect it then it’s best to not allow it to do so. If you don’t have anti-malware software then I suggest you get XoftSpySE: As a user of XoftSpySE myself I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone seeking a thorough and comprehensive defence against spyware.it’s designed to scan the user’s complete computer system to detect spyware parasites and quarantine the infected files for immediate protection. It scans your entire PC, including running processes, registry entries, files and folders; it detects and removes: adware, spyware, pop-Up generators, keyloggers, trojans, hijackers, and malware; it’s fast, powerful, and easy to use, and you get comprehensive customer technical support with your subscription. It even protects against identity and credit card theft. To discover more and get a FREE scan Click Here! |
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There’s a Storm Worm Storm Brewing
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In their press release on this new version of the old threat, the FBI said: “The spammers spreading this virus are preying on Internet users and making their computers an unwitting part of criminal botnet activity. We urge [all] citizens [of every country] to help prevent the spread of botnets by becoming web-savvy.” |
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XoftSpySE Anti-Spyware As a user of XoftSpySE myself I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone seeking a thorough and comprehensive defence against spyware. Designed to scan the user’s complete computer system to detect spyware parasites and quarantine the infected files for immediate protection, XoftSpySE is your fast, dependable anti-spyware defence. § Complete PC scanning, including running processes, registry entries, files and folders § Detects and removes: adware, spyware, pop-Up generators, keyloggers, trojans, hijackers, and malware § One of the largest spyware definition databases in the industry § Automatic definition and feature updates § Fast, powerful, and easy to use § Comprehensive customer technical support § Protects against identity and credit card theft To discover more and get a FREE scan Click Here! |
