Monthly Archives: January 2014

OED’s Word of the Year – Glassholes

30 Thursday Jan 2014

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Glassholes

Every year the venerable old Oxford English Dictionary announces its word of the year. Last year’s OED word of the year was SELFIES those smartphone photos we can’t help but keep snapping of ourselves. I’m predicting that next year’s OED word of the year will be GLASSHOLES. I’m guessing that Glassholes will be a word we use to define nerds who can’t stop talking to Google Glass out loud in public places and become distracted while interacting with Google Glass while doing important things like driving. “O.K. Glass. Start recording” Google has so far only allowed a few thousand “fortunate” people to test Google Glass, the wearable glasses that show video in the upper portion of the right lens of Google Glass. But in the early Fall of this year Google has assured us that anyone with an extra 15 hundred dollars can buy Google Glass and that means that by the end of 2014 millions of Glassholes will be sharing the the nation’s roadways with us.

The Glassholes are coming. Prepare yourself. http://bit.ly/1bzgGlc

Bi-Polar Vortexers

25 Saturday Jan 2014

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GlobalWarming

It causes me to sigh and roll my eyes when I hear people try to use the first two cold snaps of the year as proof that Global Warming is a left-wing hoax. Last year was the fourth warmest year ever recorded. All of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. According to publications on NASA’s website, ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activity and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

How to Hack a PC

12 Sunday Jan 2014

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HackPC

It’s probably easier for someone to break into your laptop or home computer than it would be for them to get into your phone. If you have your iPhone or Android phone password protected, that device is far more secure from intrusion than your Windows PC is or even your Mac is, for that matter.

A few days ago I put up a post on this blog about how to get rid of this recent virus wreaking havoc on PC’s world-wide called the FBI MoneyPak virus. A friend of mine got hit with it so I took his laptop home with me and managed over the course of several hours to pry this nasty thing out of his computer. You can scroll down and read about how I finally managed to defeat the dreaded FBI MoneyPak virus by hacking into his PC, creating a new account and running system restore from the command line.

 

Anyway, this got me to thinking about how easy it would be for someone to break into my own home computer or my laptop. You don’t have to be as tech savvy as Edward Snowden to hack a PC. Hell, even I can do it and so can you. All you need is some free sofware loaded on a thumbdrive and a small amount of familiarity with the Command Line.

 

For that matter, if all you want to do is steal some files all you really need to do is boot into the PC with any Linux distribution like the ever popular
Ubuntu. Just download the live Ubuntu .iso file and burn it to a CD or a USB stick and use it to boot up the PC you want to hack. The moment you start the target PC start tapping the F8 key to get to the boot menu and use the Arrow key to get to “Boot from CD” or Boot from J Drive or wherever and hit Enter. Once Ubuntu boots up you should have access to every file on the PC. Go to the E: drive or wherever you have Ubuntu and make it half a window and start dragging files onto it. Pretty simple.

 

O.K. let’s say for some reason that didn’t work for you or instead of lifting a few pics or docs you need access to the whole Windows OS. The first thing to try is the Linux-based Trinity Rescue CD. Every self-respecting geek aught to have this free software on a thumb drive. With Trinity Rescue you can boot into any password protected PC, you can clean up the bugs that may have been giving you trouble booting from the hard drive. It’s an amazingly useful little tool that makes hacking a Windows computer a very simple thing to do. Depending on the situation you may need to use the Command Line to create a new Administrator account.

 

I’ve read that another easy way to hack a PC is to buy Kon-Boot for $15 and, supposedly, you won’t have to even mess with the command line.

 

I certainly don’t advocate hacking into other people’s computers without their permission but every now and then someone will forget a password, maleware may lock you or your family member out or other situations might arise where there is a legitimate reason to break into a PC. Hacking a PC is a pretty simple thing to do.

Phishing Scam

05 Sunday Jan 2014

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PhishingSpam

Here’s a screen shot of an email I received the other day that claimed to be from Bank of America. I noticed right away that this thing was bogus. Look at it closely yourself. The most glaring give away that this thing is an obvious phishing scam perpetrated by someone whose mother tongue is certainly not American English is the header of the document in which the perps use of the phrase: Your Bank of America Accounts Has Been Locked. And even the rest of the text in this phishing spam attack reads like it was written by someone not entirely comfortable with American English.

Naturally I didn’t click the link provided but I did some googleing and found that if I had I would have been sent to a page that looked like a Bank of America page that asked for my Bank of America username, password, security key, date of birth and the last 4 digits of my ssn. If a person were to fill that out and click “next” the page would close and that info would be sent to the crook’s servers giving them all they needed to wipe out that person’s checking and savings accounts.

Google the phrase “Your Bank of America Accounts Has Been Locked” to investigate this phishing scam for yourself.

FBI MoneyPak Virus

02 Thursday Jan 2014

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MoneyPak

How many of you have heard of or read about the “United States Courts Ransomware MoneyPak Virus”? It puts a pop-up on your Desktop that totally freezes your machine. I mean you can’t do anything. Your computer is permanently stuck until you manage to get rid of this thing. This crapware purports to be from the US Government telling you that you have done something you need to pay a fine for. It tells you to go to Wal-mart or 7-Eleven and use MoneyPak to send money to a particular account and in return they will send you a key that will unfreeze your computer. Sure they will.

I just spent an entire afternoon cleaning “FBI MoneyPak Virus” off of a friend’s laptop. I dealt with Moneypak virus once before about a year ago (it’s actually a trojan) and I easily destroyed it using Hijack This software on a thumb drive. This time was different though. This new version of the Moneypak Virus is apparently capable of deflecting a BIOS directive to boot from any drive other than the hard drive so even when I tried to boot my friend’s PC with the thumb drive I still was presented with the MoneyPak image displayed on the Desktop with no way to close it in order to access anything at all on the computer.

I eventually managed to boot the thing into Safe Mode with Command Prompt as apposed to regular Safe Mode and worked my way to C:\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exe and was able to run Windows Restore from the Command Prompt. After about three hours the PC finally re-booted into an earlier state before it had been infected. Of course I knew the virus was still on the hard drive so I re-booted into Safe Mode with Command Prompt and ran AVG from there which found and quarantined the bugs that cause the Moneypak infestation which appear to be Trojan Generic10_c.msk, Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Reveton!A2 and Gen:Variant.Symmi.17656

If you Google “FBI MoneyPak Virus” you’ll find dozens of pages claiming that Hitman Pro on a thumb drive is the way to deal with this thing and I tried that but System Restore from the Command Prompt was the only way I could find to beat it.