One day, everything on your computer is fine. Then, suddenly you start noticing suspicious behavior- your CPU is cranking away when you aren’t doing anything, your 20 Gb of free space on your hard drive has disappeared down to 3 Gb, ports are open on that you didn’t set up. There is a good...
Read more →Hopefully you keep your computers patched and updated and your network is secure. However, it is fairly inevitable that you will at some point be hit with malicious activity- a virus, worm, Trojan horse, hack attack or otherwise. When that happens, if you have done the right things before the attack you will make...
Read more →Why Should I Disable Remote Assistance or Remote Desktop? Simple. Either could be used or exploited by an attacker to gain remote access to your system, allowing them to run programs on your computer or use your computer to distribute spam or attack other computers. Having a spare key hidden under a rock by...
Read more →Microsoft has made a number of changes to the default settings in Windows 2003 to make it more secure “out of the box.” In Part 2, we’ll examine the changes that have been made to the default settings for common services and changes in the authentication process, and we’ll discuss some areas in which...
Read more →One big change, very noticeable in Windows Server 2003, is the difference in default settings. In this two-part article, we’ll look at how the out-of-the-box server differs in its defaults from previous versions and how the new defaults make the OS more secure (while at the same time causing frustration for some admins and...
Read more →Microsoft released three security bulletins for February. One of them, MS04-007, addresses what some say is potentially the largest vulnerability in the history of the Windows operating system- and that is no small claim. The flaws that allowed malware such as CodeRed and Nimda to spread weren’t a small thing. The flaw that allowed...
Read more →This feature is used by various applications and devices. Many printers use the service to send notifications of problems printing- paper jam, out of paper, etc. Network monitoring software can be configured to send Windows Messenger Service alerts to specified IP addresses on the network in the event something goes wrong. As with many...
Read more →There may be a large number of people out there in the world- people with jobs and lives who don’t lurk around computer security web sites or fish through computer magazines in all their free time- who may be unaware that the long awaited Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will be released by...
Read more →Users should follow basic security advice like that found in Security Basics In A Home Computing Environment, Password Security, or In Depth Security. But, there are some additional steps to take that are unique to Windows XP Home edition. The following list includes five things you can do to make sure your Windows XP...
Read more →Windows XP offers a very helpful feature when it comes to battling malware of all sorts. Whether your computer has been compromised by a Trojan, infected by a virus or infiltrated by spyware, you can simply go back in time to a point before the computer had any problems. System Restore periodically saves a...
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