You can block a lot of ads and tracking by editing the hosts file on Windows and other operating systems. It is a local override that runs before your ISP’s DNS — useful against known bad domains as well as noisy ad servers. Once you rely on a custom hosts file, also read Protect Hosts File so malware cannot quietly rewrite it. Pair with a real antivirus and, where helpful, a site advisor-style reputation tool. ...
There are good reasons to be suspicious of e-mail. Some e-mail messages might be phishing scams, some might carry viruses. Images in spam e-mail might turn out to be pornographic, or to include Web beacons, which can be adapted to secretly send a message back to the sender. Follow these guidelines to help protect yourself when suspicious mail shows up in your Inbox. 1. Do not respond — and don’t open junk mail If an e-mail looks suspicious, don’t risk your personal information by responding to it. Delete junk e-mail messages without opening them. Sometimes even opening spam can alert spammers or put an unprotected computer at risk. Don’t reply to e-mail unless you’re certain that the message comes from a legitimate source. This includes not responding to messages that offer an option to “Remove me from your list.” Do not “unsubscribe” unless the mail is from a known or trusted sender. Use the junk mail tools in your e-mail program. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and most providers let you mark messages as spam or phishing, which trains their filters and blocks the sender. 2. Approach links with caution Links in phishing e-mail messages often take you to phony sites that encourage you to transmit personal or financial information to con artists. Avoid clicking a link in an e-mail message unless you are sure of the real target address, or URL. ...
A few clues can help you spot fraudulent e-mail messages or links within them. What does a phishing e-mail look like? Phishing e-mail messages are designed to steal your identity. They ask for personal data, or direct you to Web sites or phone numbers to call where they ask you to provide personal data. Phishing e-mail messages take a number of forms: They might appear to come from your bank or financial institution, a company you regularly do business with, such as Microsoft, or from your social networking site. They might appear to be from someone you know. Spear phishing is a targeted form of phishing in which an e-mail message might look like it comes from your employer, or from a colleague who might send an e-mail message to everyone in the company, such as the head of human resources or IT. They might ask you to make a phone call. Phone phishing (vishing) scams direct you to call a customer support phone number. A person or an audio response unit waits to take your account number, personal identification number, password, or other valuable personal data. They might include official-looking logos and other identifying information taken directly from legitimate Web sites, and they might include convincing details about your personal information that scammers found on your social networking pages. They might include links to spoofed Web sites where you are asked to enter personal information. To make these messages look even more legitimate, scam artists may place a link that appears to go to the legitimate Web site, but actually takes you to a phony scam site or a pop-up window that looks exactly like the official site. ...
Online fraud is annoying, costly, and risky for both your accounts and your computer. You can cut a lot of that risk by learning to recognize scams and keeping a few habits consistent. Identity theft predates the web, but going online made it cheaper for criminals to reach large numbers of people. Attackers who want your accounts use phishing, hoaxes, and related tricks to obtain personal information — name, government ID numbers, account names, passwords, and more. ...
Phishing (pronounced “fishing”) is a type of online identity theft. It uses e-mail, text messages, and fraudulent Web sites that are designed to steal your personal data or information such as credit card numbers, passwords, account data, or other information. Con artists might send millions of fraudulent messages with links to fraudulent Web sites that appear to come from Web sites you trust, like your bank or credit card company, and request that you provide personal information. Criminals can use this information for many different types of fraud, such as to steal money from your account, to open new accounts in your name, or to obtain official documents using your identity. ...
Malware sometimes rewrites the hosts file to redirect you to malicious sites or to cut you off from update and security vendors. Locking the hosts file makes unauthorized edits harder. This note was written when Avira Premium Security Suite could lock the hosts file from its firewall settings. Product UIs change; the idea remains: immunize known malware domains first, then prevent silent rewrites. Before you lock Review how the hosts file works. Immunize by blocking known malware domains (for example with a hosts manager such as HostsMan). Then lock the file. Unlock periodically if you want to refresh blocked domains (weekly or monthly). Locking with Avira (historical steps) Assuming you have Avira Premium Security Suite: ...
In computer security, a sandbox is a security mechanism for separating running programs. It is often used to execute untested code, or untrusted programs from unverified third-parties, suppliers and untrusted users. I recommend Sandboxie for daily use on Windows — the open-source fork maintained by the Sandboxie-Plus community after the original project was discontinued. The sandbox typically provides a tightly-controlled set of resources for guest programs to run in, such as scratch space on disk and memory. Network access, the ability to inspect the host system or read from input devices are usually disallowed or heavily restricted. In this sense, sandboxes are a specific example of virtualization. ...
A website reputation tool (often called a site advisor) warns whether a site looks safe, questionable, or risky — commonly shown as green / yellow / red next to search results. These programs usually install as a browser add-on and surface ratings while you use engines such as Google or Yahoo. They typically flag sites associated with phishing or scams, viruses or spyware, spam, browser exploits, and similar abuse. How ratings work Reputation metrics are usually collected from other users who have interacted with the site. Each user indicates whether they were satisfied or not. In the simplest model, reputation is an aggregate of those past ratings. ...
Spam is any kind of unwanted online communication. Common types of spam The most common form is unwanted e-mail. You can also get: Text message spam — sometimes called smishing Instant message spam — sometimes known as spim Social networking spam Harmless vs. dangerous spam Some spam is annoying but harmless. However, some spam is part of an identity theft scam or another kind of fraud. Identity theft spam is often called a phishing scam. ...
If you suspect that you’ve responded to a phishing scam with personal or financial information, take these steps to minimize any damage. Step 1: Report the incident Contact the following authorities: Your credit card company, if you have given your credit card information. The sooner an organization knows your account may have been compromised, the easier it will be for them to help protect you. The company that you believe was forged. Remember to contact the organization directly, not through the e-mail message you received. In the United States, report identity theft at IdentityTheft.gov and file a fraud report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. You can also report the phishing scam to the Anti-Phishing Working Group by forwarding the phishing e-mail message as an attachment to [email protected]. ...
WiniGuard is rogue antispyware — scareware dressed up as a legitimate security product. It exploits fear of PC infections to push a paid “cleanup.” It does not protect the machine; infected PCs should have it removed, not licensed. This page is a 2009-era field dossier: how it behaved, how it typically arrived, and the filesystem / registry fingerprints shared across the clone family. For the wider genealogy, see The biggest rogue family. ...
After Adobe absorbed Macromedia, Dreamweaver remained the default tool for many small teams building corporate sites, portfolios, and internal portals. Dreamweaver CS4 adds better CSS tooling, Live View powered by WebKit, and closer ties to the Adobe stack — but the hard part is still the same: keeping sites maintainable after launch. What CS4 Improved Live View renders pages with a WebKit engine — closer to Safari and Chrome than the old Design view approximation Stronger CSS panel workflows for designers who do not want to hand-write every rule Better code hinting for PHP and JavaScript Integration hooks for Photoshop comps and Bridge asset management Spry framework widgets for menus and form validation — use sparingly Subversion integration for teams finally moving off shared folders Live View reduces “upload and pray” cycles. You still need to test in IE7 and Firefox 3 — WebKit is not the whole audience. ...
Johnny Cash (born J. R. Cash; February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003) was a Grammy Award-winning American country singer-songwriter. Cash is widely considered to be one of the most influential American musicians of the 20th century. Cash was known for his deep, distinctive bass-baritone voice, the “freight train” sound of his Tennessee Three backing band, his demeanor, and his dark clothing, which earned him the nickname “The Man in Black”. He traditionally started his concerts with the introduction “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”. ...
A hacker who posted candid photographs of Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus on the internet was the subject of an FBI raid yesterday. 19-year-old Josh Holly, of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, boasted that he had broken into the Disney teen queen’s email account and stolen photos - including, according to media reports, pictures of her baring her midriff in the shower, and “posing provactively” in her underwear and swimsuit. ...
If Sysinternals shows you what is running, OllyDbg shows you what a program is thinking — one x86 instruction at a time. In 2008 it is the standard debugger for 32-bit Windows binaries: unpack a crackme, trace a malware sample in a lab, or understand why an installer behaves oddly when the vendor will not answer support calls. OllyDbg 1.10 is the version most people use. It is freeware, debugger-only (no disassembler license debates), and extensible with plugins. ...