Beware of WiniBlueSoft

Imagine a scenario: You're doing your normal activities at home, and comfortably. Suddenly you hear a siren at your gate and when you open it, you see a police officer leading an armed squad. He seems to be at full alert and tells you that you and your house is at a high risk and they're there to protect you against any potential threats. While you're not even able to evaluate the whole situation, they rush inside your house and take positions. Then suddenly, the leader announces that you and your house are in their control and they start a pre-planned robbery.

Too filmy? Okay, in someway you're right. But you too wouldn't say that it's not totally impossible, would you? At such times, it's natural for you to hate your own being tricked by the fake policemen more than anything else.

Well, that was a ficitious scenario with some rogue cops. But your worry doesn't end here. Just tell me one thing - how many a time have you been fooled by a rogue software? If your answer is 'never', then I'd have to say that you're too ignorant to have noticed. To stimulate a better recollection, let me give you a simple clue. Haven't you ever seen an alert (usually a pop-up dialog box) out of the blue stating that your system is at risk and needs to be fixed immediately? My guess is, you have even clicked on the button that's supposed to fix the problem automatically by some sophisticated anti-virus or security related software, unless you're a geek.

So, my point is, an average computer user can easily fall for such fake alerts and give a generous welcome to some malicious software that stealthily takes control of or exploits one or more areas of your system. In my experience, it's better to watch out for what's real and what's fake rather than to panic after you realise that you're already under attack. To do so, you need to be able to tell the bad cops from the good ones.

I just came to know about a recently discovered rogue anti-spyware software named "WiniBlueSoft", being promoted as being promoted as “Your Best Spyware Protection”, while the truth is that it itself is loaded with several malware. Next time you see a window as shown below, keep in mind that it's a devil in disguise and open no doors for it.

You can find more details on this particular case from the following links:

Lavasoft Security Center Blog
PreciseSecurity.com Blog
Removal-Tool.com

Readymade pies versus graphics

No matter how much time you spend on your computer, you're more or less likely to get headaches whenever it comes to creating new graphics or editing existing ones. Less if you're a chef, and more if you've always had readymade pies but never tried baking one on your own. Computer graphics are undoubtedly more complicated than pies, in fact. For, it's not just about striking concepts, but much more about mastering the tools to turn those concepts into meaningful and usable shapes.

Apparently, the template that I'm using and customising for my blog doesn't seem to require much fancy graphics. However, I felt that the three links (viz. 'older posts', 'newer posts' and 'home') that appear below the last post of each page were somewhat unnoticeable. That is to say, browsing through my blog pages could be a bit confusing and require new visitors to spend some extra time to figure out the corresponding links. Therefore, I decided to place some nice and simple buttons beside each of those, but nothing too much flashy.

I could have tried whatever I knew of  Photoshop or Illustrator, but I didn't feel like spending much time today. If professional designers can fetch ready-to-use graphics from the WWW, why can't I give it a try? So I spent a few minutes Googling and scanning through the resultant pages. You're right, thousands of items were found, but there was no way I could check them all.

I quickly shortlisted about six. Out of those, two sites really caught my attention, both offering a plentiful of ready-to-use icon sets for free. To cut the long story short, I downloaded a set of icons each from WeFunction.com and GoSquared.com. The first one was in a .Zip archive which on being extracted gave 128 .PNG icons of 48x48 pixel size. I chose three and quickly converted them into transparent .GIF files and uploaded immediately. The second one was a layered file containing 85 icons in the Illustrator CS2 format, which I'll see later. In appreciation of their works, I also left short comments for the creators.

I hope you'll like these and more of the free stuffs offered by both sites. If you wish, you can simply save the .JPG previews and cut out the icons you like. Those will lose transparency, but can be used on a white background without any noticeable difference. And if you do like the stuffs on those sites, refer those to your friends. After all, good works deserve some publicity, whether asked for or not.

A miraculous recovery

Phew! What a relief it was after suffering from one of the worst attacks I've encountered till date! Although I have survived all such attacks, it took me two days before I could actually get rid of this particular one. I'll try to explain briefly about the infection and the riddance too, so that you can get prepared beforehand.

Two days ago, in an attempt to repair my cousin's desktop PC running on Windows XP SP 2, I connected my portable HDD to her system. I didn't realise at that time that it was infected by a highly active, persistent and polymorphic parasitic worm of the "Win32.Mabezat" family. None of the tools I was carrying was able to fix her PC, so I decided to fix it at home and took her HDD. When I checked it early in the morning yesterday, I realised that the worm was deeply rooted and badly spread throughout her HDD. I then checked my portable drive and was panicked to see that it too had caught the same infection. Like I said, none of the tools known to me was capable of eliminating the infection while saving my stuffs.

Then I started digging the net to learn more about the infection and its removal procedures. Just for the figure's sake, my Maxtor Basics Portable 160 GB drive showed more than 3,400 files infected with the worm. More than 50% of those are my hard earned assets - documents, utilities and other files that I can't afford to lose at any cost. Had it been for Avast! or some other antivirus that doesn't care about removing the malicous code and restoring the items instead of deleting them directly, I would have been devastated.

So I kept on looking for some intelligent tool that would deal with the infection while sparing me most of what I possess of my being in the field of computers so far. Luckily I found this miraculous tool at http://www.avg.com/us.virus-removal.ndi-93495. To minimise the risk of spreading the worm through my home network, I downloaded it on my laptop, transferred it to my 2 GB Sandisk Cruzer drive and then finally copied it to the desktop PC which I had been using for the diagnostics and recovery. The moment I launched this tool, it started cleaning up my system. It traced every single modified file and deleted which were copies of the worm while sanitised my other files. It did everything silently, without having me to even input anything during the process. To make sure, I opened a few of the 'repaired' or 'healed' files and was satisfied that they opened correctly.

If you would like to learn more about the nature of this evil worm, check the online virus encyclopedia by AVG Technologies or Trend Micro.

In 2003, I had been one of the early victims of the widespread 'Blaster' infection. I had been using Symantec Norton Antivirus (v. 2003) which reported nothing wrong in my systems while all of them were badly infected. It was then when I found Avast! Antivirus and switched to it immediately. Since that day, I've been using it and recommending it to anyone who sought my advice. I was and still am a fan of Avast's boot time scanner. For today's recovery however, I'll remain thankful to the geniuses at AVG Technologies who created such an effective cleaner.

Funny CAPTCHA

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Well, that's the full form of CAPTCHA, something we're familiar with and encounter everyday. The definition, as cited by Nemesys goes like this: A test that is designed to be easy for a human to do, but be difficult to automate. An example of a captcha is the practice of displaying distorted letters and asking the user to type them into a form.

As I was about to download something from one of the so-called free hosts just a few minutes ago, I saw the weirdest CAPTCHA I've faced so far. Unaware of the underlying trap I simply typed all the characters displayed but immediately got an error message. Only then I read the funny instruction right above it and couldn't help laughing alone in my room, in the middle of the night.



Watch out for such dual purpose CAPTCHAs, smart enough to annoy humans apart from deceiving OCR software.