AFL Computer Consulting, LLC Blog

It is well know that the reason computers running Windows get viruses is there are so many of them out in the world compared to Macs and Linux is that more people use them than the other computers. If you are going to try to infect many people you go after the computer system with the most users. So, people using Macs feel that they don’t have to worry. I have been trying to tell these people (even though I specialize in Windows based computers) that this is does not mean you don’t have to worry about them. Below is the start of an article I was reading this morning.

“Apple’s Get-a-Mac ads (and many longtime Mac users and fans) love to imply that Mac OS X is a far safer and more secure platform than Windows. And there is a ring of truth to that implication. There are far more instances of malware and viruses bogging down Windows PCs than afflict Macs.
But that doesn’t mean Macs are perfectly safe and secure computers — after all, no computer is completely safe and secure on the Internet.
New malware threats (including the discovery of the first botnet operating on infected Mac OS X machines) are cropping up this year. It’s likely just a sign of things to come as Apple gains market share and visibility.
So Mac users need to understand their options for protecting their systems from malware, network attacks, and other threats. “

I just got off the phone from a cousin of mine who started to ask me about an email that she received from a friend. She wasn’t surprised to receive an email from him. But, this ones subject said that it had “family pictures”. The friend opened it when he received it. he even went online and followed the details that were in the email and it took him to a site called instant411 or something similar.

Fortunately, my cousin deleted the email without opening it. This is an old virus type email that has been making its way around for a long time. It grabs your contacts and sends the email as if coming from you to them. The idea is to either infect more and more computers and/or to get you to actually go to the site and pay for something.

Please remember some simple rules.
1) If you receive an email from someone you don’t know, especially if it has an attachment, don’t be quick to open it. You should probably just delete it.
2) If you receive an email from someone that you know, but it doesn’t make sense to receive an email with that subject, either delete it or call who it came from first. Such as, if you receive an email from a business associate that says ‘pictures of the family’. Why would you be getting pictures of their family?

By the way, the friend said that he opened the email on a Mac, not a PC. This just goes to show that Mac’s aren’t immune from viruses. All computers need good antivirus software and antispyware software. And/or to be regularly scanned by a professional.

In an event that hits the computer world only once every few years, security experts are racing against time to mitigate the impact of a bit of malware which is set to wreak havoc on a hard-coded date. As is often the case, that date is April 1.
Malware creators love to target April Fool’s Day with their wares, and the latest worm, called Conficker C, could be one of the most damaging attacks we’ve seen in years.
Conficker first bubbled up in late 2008 and began making headlines in January as known infections topped 9 million computers. Now in its third variant, Conficker C, the worm has grown incredibly complicated, powerful, and virulent… though no one is quite sure exactly what it will do when D-Day arrives.
Thanks in part to a quarter-million-dollar bounty on the head of the writer of the worm, offered by Microsoft, security researchers are aggressively digging into the worm’s code as they attempt to engineer a cure or find the writer before the deadline. What’s known so far is that on April 1, all infected computers will come under the control of a master machine located somewhere across the web, at which point anything’s possible. Will the zombie machines become denial of service attack pawns, steal personal information, wipe hard drives, or simply manifest more traditional malware pop-ups and extortion-like come-ons designed to sell you phony security software? No one knows.
Conficker is clever in the way it hides its tracks because it uses an enormous number of URLs to communicate with HQ. The first version of Conficker used just 250 addresses each day — which security researchers and ICANN simply bought and/or disabled — but Conficker C will up the ante to 50,000 addresses a day when it goes active, a number which simply can’t be tracked and disabled by hand.
At this point, you should be extra vigilant about protecting your PC: Patch Windows completely through Windows Update and update your anti-malware software as well. Make sure your antivirus software is actually running too, as Conficker may have disabled it.

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