Viruses Archives - The Silicon Underground

One in five Macs has malware–but read the fine print

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 04:04:47 +0000

Sophos claimed today that 20% of the people who’ve installed their free Mac antivirus has malware. That’s not altogether surprising, but it’s also not nearly as big of a problem as it sounds. One in 36 systems has Mac malware,

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What’s going on with Macintosh security?

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:34:34 +0000

The latest figures I’ve read say there are perhaps a half-million infected Macintoshes still floating around out there, an improvement from the high of 600,000 that I was seeing a few weeks ago, but probably not what Apple had hoped

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The old days of viruses

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:07:00 +0000

Blogging pioneer John Dominik, inspired by my Michelangelo memories, wrote about his memories of viruses later in the decade. So now I’ll take inspiration of him and share my memories of some of those viruses. I searched my archives, and

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Beware the Mebromi, my son: BIOS infections

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:58:00 +0000

Symantec has identified Mebromi. a piece of malware that not only infects the MBR, but also infects the Award BIOS. BIOS infections are very difficult to detect and eradicate. By hooking into the BIOS, Mebromi can easily re-infect a system

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How to clean viruses off other people’s systems safely

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 03:07:33 +0000

What should you do when someone hands you a computer, tells you they think it has a virus, and asks you to clean it? Proceed carefully, that’s what. You don’t want to infect your other computers with whatever it has.

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Fix host hijacks or host file hijacks for free

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:55:43 +0000

Sometimes your antivirus will tell you that you have host hijacks or host file hijacks, but not elaborate on how to fix them. Some people charge way too much to fix them. Here’s how to fix host hijacks or host

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Hey! I’m famous!

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 01:57:40 +0000

I got mentioned in a post about Adblock Plus on Lifehacker.

In a comment about something else, I mentioned that you should install Adblock Plus and turn on the Malware Domains subscription to give yourself protection beyond what your antivirus software does. If intercepting bad-guy software is good, not even downloading it in the first place is better.

I guess someone liked the advice.

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First impressions: HP Mini 110

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:15:40 +0000

I spent a few hours last night with an HP Mini 110 1012NR. It's a model with a 16 GB solid state drive (no spinning mechanical hard drive) and Windows XP.

My biggest beef is the keyboard. It's undersized, and I can't touch type on it. Try it out before you buy one.

The rest of the system isn't bad, but there are some things you'll want to do with it.

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Read this if you are using the free AVG 6.0 antivirus software

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 23:03:39 +0000

Grisoft has offered a free edition of its AVG 6.0 antivirus software for several years. Unfortunately it has discontinued the product and will stop offering updates on 31 December.

The solution is to download their new free version.

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Outsource your home e-mail to keep viruses at bay

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 03:29:59 +0000

I'm going to be spending most of Saturday patching servers at work, and Microsoft just kindly dropped four new patches I didn't want in my Easter basket (so run Windows Update on your home PC if you haven't recently), and that reminds me of something.

End users are notoriously bad about running Windows Update and updating their virus definitions, both of which really need to be done on a regular basis in these terrible times. Microsoft doesn't seem to realize not everyone has broadband and this takes some time, but that's the price of running Windows, I guess.

I have a suggestion for people who aren't very technical.

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