I’m actually extremely glad I’ve been dead wrong in my first three predictions since starting this series. I’m an Econ & Finance major who graduated at the top of his class, passed the series 7 stock broker exam on the first attempt back in 1987, and have been a portfolio manager for over 30 years. Why am I glad to look so foolish? Simply to ‘prove’ what I say in the first paragraph.

Even though I’ve been wrong, my portfolio is in fine shape because… I didn’t sell anything even though I thought the Stock Market was going to tank. Do you understand that? I take a long-term approach to investing and don’t trade often. My belief that the Market would dive simply kept me from making any new investments at this time. You really don’t lose money in the Market until you sell; you only lose paper-value or net worth when the Market drops. More on this concept in a later report.

Two things make the Stock Market move: Fear & Greed. There are a number of reasons I think a correction is due, but remember, I could be wrong, wrong, wrong again. I don’t think we are even close to being out of this recession. The Euro currency situation is still a mess. Earnings, while some up, are not all that good. Unemployment is still very high. The Market has had a nice increase of over 2,000 points (19%) since the huge drop in August 2011, and I think greed has taken over. People are buying to keep from missing the greed boat to paradise.

Maybe the DOW has to hit 13K for Fear to set in, and the selloff I see occurs. We still have that irrational fear of Friday the 13th…

If the DOW drops back into the 11K range like I think it will in the coming months, remember the adage my mentor, Jones Babier, made me promise to say to everyone I ever gave advice to: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Also remember not to panic. You buy when everyone else is panicking.

Till next Monday, Steve

Our new website has a Recommendations page, but we haven’t had the time to work on it yet. It only contains our favorite right now. Please visit the LinkedIn profile of Steve Kozy for several kind words about our service.

You know you have this virus when multiple windows start to appear on your screen in a tiled fashion… over 30 of them! Each has a different message, like “hard drive failure” and “delayed write cache”. Then a window pops up acting like it is checking your system for viruses that you cannot make go away. Wow.

How do you clean it? I’m going to show you a method here, but this virus corrupts the Windows operating system where it is almost impossible to completely fix. Maybe in a few weeks someone will probably write a routine that will do that, but after Googling for three hours, I could not find one. You clean it by downloading a program called “rkill” to a USB flash stick & start the program. Rkill pops up a DOS box and takes about 5 to 10 minutes to run. This removes the virus from memory and allows you to run a good virus cleaner (I use Malwarebytes) that should clean the root virus. Make sure you run the cleaner before rebooting or the tiles will come right back.

Now is the very tricky part. The virus changes the “attributes” of every file and folder on your hard drive to Hidden, making you think there is nothing on the drive! The best way to fix this is to have an IT guy remove your drive, hook it up to another PC, and use Windows to “un-hide” everything. Another way is to get out to the DOS command box and run “attrib -h -s *.* /S /D”. This method lets you see most of your files, but not all of them.

Even then, the biggest problem is when you click the Start Button, and then click “All Programs”, you will probably see nothing. Your desktop might not have the icons on it you’re used to seeing. Ouch. With the two users I fixed, I simply put shortcuts to the programs they use on the desktop. This at least allowed them to work on their PCs until a convenient time came to have me back up their data again and do a complete Windows re-install. Believe me, I read enough articles in the last two days that confirm this is the only way to completely fix your PC is you catch this virus.

Virus protection is a complex subject. Complex to the point where you could have college degrees dedicated to it, and Masters programs covering the removal of the nastiest ones. Believe me, there are certain virus types, known as “rootkits,” which are almost impossible to recover from. In fact, part of the grade in a Masters program would be to know when the situation is hopeless – just give up, backup the client’s data (twice, just in case), format the hard drive and start from scratch.

I’m sure none of you want to attend Virus U., so the series is broken down into five easy subjects. This “cliff notes” article will give you the most important info from each of them. Our material is presented in laymen’s terms as much as possible. The series will publish on our website during September & October 2010.

A) Your #1 protection against Viruses – automate the backup of your most important files

Interesting way to start off this series, but it simply can’t be overlooked. It happened more back in the DOS days, but we tackled a virus last month that actually deleted files from a PC. These are rare, but of course the most dangerous. A Fortune 500 company caught one of these babies this year and it wiped out the data on several of the company’s massive servers. That catastrophe started at one lonely PC on their network, and then spread like a Justin Bieber youtube video.

No matter how much money you spend, you are never fully protected from the Lex Luthers who create viruses. Therefore, your only real protection is to backup your data properly, and test your backups from time to time to insure your data is safe (useable).

Backing up PC data properly is an entire degree w/Masters program by itself, but here is one of the tips from our website that you need to know right now: use USB flash sticks or external hard drives. Do not use CDs or DVDs. The average usable life of a DVD burned on a PC is only two years; CDs are like 7 years. You might lose half the pictures you burned to DVD for safe keeping within two short years…your kid’s pictures…what a disaster.

B) What are Viruses and who creates them?

Viruses are infections that get injected into the Operating System {Windows XP, Mac os10, Windows7, etc.} of your PC. These infections are just little sub-programs that now start automatically every time you turn the PC on. The number of documented viruses in the world hit one million in 2009. Each of these tiny programs may do different things, but all have one thing in common: they want control of your PC.

My all-time most popular question from clients on this subject is: “Who creates these things?” I always come back with my pat answer: “Some kid in Cambodia who’s perfecting his IT skills, so he can come to the US and make big bucks.” Substitute China, India, the Ukraine (my homeland; the best virus writers in the world come from this part of Mother Russia), and that answer becomes very valid. Over 50% of all viruses were created by students in college classrooms.

C) Our review of the Virus Protection software currently on the market

We hate Norton Security Suite. Kinda hate AVG these days; we used to like it. Always hated McAfee (we had a slogan back in the Windows95 day; “I would rather have a virus on my computer rather than McAfee anti-virus; the PC still might work with just a virus”).

Software Knowledge uses several small (free) tools, along with our favorite “always-on” protection program. We currently recommend the combination of Malwarebytes & Avira to our clients. This is the fourth always-on protection solution we’ve used in the last 7 years. You might be interested, maybe shocked, by the reasons why we keep changing…

D) What to do if you catch a Virus

Don’t panic, and please don’t break out the VISA and buy the program you see on your screen.

Close your Internet browser and open your always-on virus protection. Try to perform an update (but the best-written viruses usually break this and you might get an error). Try updating any other anti-virus/anti-malware programs you have installed; these updates may also fail. Disconnect your LAN cable or turn off your wireless signal, reboot (restart) your computer, and then try to run your always-on AV program. If it catches something, tell it to remove, and then restart the PC again. Continue by running the next AV program you have. If you still have problems, get to a PC that works and study this full subject on our website; due to publish 10/10/10.

One quick tip (that few people think about): Get to a clean PC and change your online banking passwords. Better safe…

E) Why doesn’t your Firewall protect you? And other advanced topics

Unless you bought a $500US hardware firewall device, and then paid a firm like ours to configure & fine-tune your “proxy” settings (about another $500US), your firewall is Swiss cheese…and even if you have this level of protection {like we do}, you’re still cheese… just like us. Trust me.

In summary: A) backup your files regularly! B) do not take viruses personally C) run good ‘always-on’ protection & keep it updated D) all hope is NOT lost if you catch a virus E) the worst viruses are written by really gifted people; there will never be a cure in our lifetime…

This is a Must Read series for all clients and friends. Over the years, Software Knowledge has sent out emergency email warnings w/instructions when the really bad viruses come out. If you want to be included in this virus warning group, please visit our website and drop a message in the Contact Us tab. We’d love to make you part of our family.

Then I came to my senses. Why not Google ‘nacha.org spam’? What do you know?; here are the results:

This is always the easiest way to spot a fake email; just Google what it is about. If it is dangerous, you are not the only person who has received it. From the screen shot above, you can see this scam has been around since 2009.

There are also a few more ways to spot fakes, even if you are the un-fortunate victim of something brand new. In the first three emails, each had a different Transaction ID. That meant three payments must have been rejected. Highly un-likely unless my bank account had been hijacked; so I went online and verified it looked ok. I knew nacha.org was a valid institution, so I went to their home page. A scam alert was posted in big print with a very detailed article about what to look for.

The last way I sometimes use to spot fake emails is rather sophisticated. It involves reading the email ‘headers’. How you do this depends on what program you use to read email, but here is what the header of one of these emails looked like:

Received: fromust-127-41.on4.ontelecoms.gr (92.118.127.41) by mail.tskcusa.com (192.168.1.138) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 14.0.722.0; Thu, 26 May 2011 04:57:32 -0500 Received: from [23.152.204.50] (helo=utkyeyivnnqukdh.bhqfyjmzhdqdts.su) by cust-127-41.on4.ontelecoms.gr with esmtpa (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1MMTQ5-6244ki-XU for skozy@tskcinc.com; Thu, 26 May 2011 02:01:14 -0800 Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 02:01:14 -0800 From: payments@nacha.org X-Mailer: The Bat! (v3.51.10) Home X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Message-ID: <8723423907.QBGHPKFE501816@rizunckbb.pldefif.biz> To: Subject: ACH payment canceled MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=”iso-8859-1″ Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-Path: blenchesl815@gmail.com X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthSource: TSKC1.tskcinc.com X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthAs: Anonymous X-MS-Exchange-Organization-PRD: nacha.org X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SenderIdResult: SoftFail Received-SPF: SoftFail (TSKC1.tskcinc.com: domain of transitioning payments@nacha.org discourages use of 92.118.127.41 as permitted sender) X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: 3 X-MS-Exchange-Organization-PCL: 2 X-MS-Exchange-Organization-Antispam-Report: DV:3.3.10116.537;SID:SenderIDStatus SoftFail;OrigIP:92.118.127.41

The very first line of the header provides the verification it is fake. Even though it appears to come from: payments@nacha.org (7th line), the real sender was “cust-127-41.on4.ontelecoms.gr” from internet address 92.118.127.41. The return path indicates it even came from a gmail account (12th line). Other parts of the whole header indicate it bounces off of at least one proxy server in an attempt to not be caught by the spam filters of the world.

Because my business assistant knows how to read email headers, I could no longer fool her with fake messages from Steven Jobs about the dream job she has always wanted! RIP Steven, you changed the computer landscape forever…

Not in this one recent case: According to a TechCrunch Europe report, a gaping security hole on the Facebook site allowed any user to view the live chats of their ‘friends’ with just a few mouse clicks. There was a Youtube video showing exactly how this worked but that video has been removed now, possibly with the financial help of the Facebook management team. This is the statement issued by that group:

Chat is unavailable as we work quickly to fix a bug reported to us. It should return to normal soon. Because of the bug, people could view friends’ chat messages and friend requests for a limited amount of time if they manipulated the “preview my profile” feature in a specific way. We’ve fixed that issue and took down Chat as soon as we became aware of it. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Now, that was just a bug in the program and it has been fixed. What we need to concentrate on are the standard Privacy options and how to change them. When you setup a new account, the Privacy settings are pretty wide open and show the entire Facebook world most of the information you put on your page. To alter privacy options, go to Account (in the top right corner), Privacy Settings.

Click Personal Information and Posts to see options about your wall and photos. Here you will see a plethora of options for your privacy. You can select from 4 different levels controlling who can view your information. The four options are: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Only Friends, and Customize.

Customize is where you specify individuals to block information. You can also block it from everybody by selecting ‘only me’ in Customize. Each photo album has its own privacy setting. You can take things even further by creating groups of friends on Lists, and then use those lists in your privacy settings.

Contact information and personal information such as city, state, education, and work can also be modified in the same way. When you click Privacy Setting from the Account tab, you will see all the options. Each one explains what settings you can modify with which menu. This section is incredibly large. You have over 30 choices to modify. If you are new to Facebook, it takes an average of 20 minutes to go through the entire profile. When you first sign up for Facebook, the default privacy settings are mostly set to Everyone and Friends of Friends.

After you’ve done changing all the settings, a preview is available to see how an individual sees your profile. It’s under Privacy Settings, Personal Information and Posts. There is button called Preview My Profile to view it.

Maybe we can’t control how Facebook uses our information, but as you can see, at least we can control who can see it (if only to keep that one nosy person away!).

If you Google “hack facebook password”, it returns almost 7 million results. You’ll find a lot of people claiming to have written programs that can do this hack. We tried to get several of these programs, but never could find one. If you search You Tube, you’ll find most of the links about this topic have the banner ‘Pulled due to inappropriate matter’ across the page. Some videos are still posted, and they present a slick demo about how their incredible programs work. When you click the link to download any of these magic beans, you get directed through mazes until you finally have to pop in a credit card. We even had our resident long-time hacker search his boards for “fbpassword.exe” and other file names: all dead links. We could not locate one of these programs.

We did find a working website we had to show you. It is a known hacker site & we do not advise you to spend much time there.

Just answer the 4 required questions, and click the Hack it button. This screen appears, with the symbols in the columns going up and down like in The Matrix:

What do you know? It worked!!!

Oh Man! You’ve finally made it. You’re going to click that Decrypt Password button and unlock all of your friend’s secrets.

Not so fast. You still have to jump through 3 more hoops including answering an email, before landing on a page that asks you to cough up 90 Euros ($114US 7/7/10) before this single password is revealed. These great guys even offer an unlimited # of hacks for a mere 50 Euros more. Wonder what they say to anyone foolish enough to send them money when the “hacked” password doesn’t work?

Hacking is an art, and there are a ton of Michelangelos out there. Software Knowledge could not find a way to easily steal a Facebook password, but we’re sure it can be done. When Facebook first started, their program could probably be ‘hacked’ pretty easily. We think a program or two probably did work once, but now their system is state of the art, and only beaten by a fluke (that is quickly fixed when found). For the heck of it, we threw a couple of brute force attacks and other ‘kiddie’ measures at facebook; none came close to having any success.

Why are we sure someone could hack your password? It can be done because of programs called ‘key-stroke loggers’. If someone (somehow, often using a virus) installs one of these programs on your PC, everything you type get recorded to a secret file that only the hacker can open. When he or she finds facebook.com in the file, they know the next thing is the username and password. This method is how many professional hackers steal bank and credit card passwords. An even more advanced way to hack someone is to ‘capture their packets’ as they fly along the Internet. You might as well throw away your computer if you have a bad breakup with someone possessing these skills.

I’m serious about how easy is it to be hacked, regardless of the defenses you put up. Watch my YouTube video about what happened at Citi Corp & Sony. Think about how much money they spend and were still ‘swiss cheese’. In today’s age of identity theft, you might be very smart to look into services like LifeLock to keep a consistent eye on your private information, especially if you use online banking.

In closing, a few Tips about Passwords…

Use at least 8 digits (using numbers and letters with one Capital makes them much stronger)

Don’t use the same password everywhere. Have one for your banking accounts, one for your main email and other important things, then one for your least important things.

Don’t use any of these passwords (they are the general 10 most common): 123456, jesus, password, love, 12345678, Christ, jesus1, princess, blessed and sunshine. We found one article listing the top 250 – which is ‘hotdog’ in case you were interested.

Who is Men of Valor? In short, the Men of Valor ministry teaches men how to make real changes so they can begin new lives once they are released from prison. If you browse their website, you will know exactly who they are, but we would like to tell you little something about them here.

Men of Valor is not just an organization that helps men get their life together, but it gives them hope for a better future. A future filled with integrity and pride. They have different programs to help men enter back into our community and be as normal as possible.

Thanks to MOV’s Aftercare/Re-Entry program, prisoners participating in Men of Valor are released into a yearlong Aftercare/Re-Entry program aimed at giving them the support, skills and accountability they need to succeed in the community. They begin with an intense, minimum of 120-day program in which participants are picked up at the prison door upon release. MOV provides new clothing, job placement, bus passes, transitional housing as well as assistance in securing identification. The program also involves one on one mentoring, parental training, marriage training, and other curriculums.

Men who have completed MOV’s Aftercare/Re-Entry Program have a recidivism rate of 12% – far and away beating the national rate of 67%.

Most of men participating in their program have children who are under the age of 18. Children learn from their parents. Men of Valor help these men to set a better example for children and avoid the path of prison. They have the knowledge, experience, passion and proven track record to do what they do best, but they need your help in continuing to do it.

Please go to their website and consider donating your time, or money. As founder Carl Carlson often says “I promise you’ll receive a blessing by supporting us”

If you purchased a key to turn on ‘real-time’ protection, please read the section below. Software Knowledge is an authorized Malwarebytes reseller, and offers 1 year subscriptions to our clients for $21.00US ($4 savings plus other benefits).

To register Malwarebytes, click on Protection tab and click Register (shown below)

A window will come up asking for Product ID and Key. It’s easier to copy and paster rather then entering it manually.

If you currently have a subscription, follow these brief steps to properly configure the new features in this upgrade. First, open the program, go to the Update Tab, and click the Click for Updates button. After the update performs, you may be asked to reboot. Second, click the Scanner Tab to see one of the new features: Perform Flash Scan. This allows you to do a very quick check of any viruses found in your RAM and startup programs. If you think you are infected, perform this scan first. If anything is found, reboot and perform a quick scan.

Software Knowledge recommends making these two changes to the default setup:

Go to the Protection Tab. If you get several annoying balloons pop up in the bottom right of your screen saying ‘Malwarebytes has detected a threat…’ you know it is working. Uncheck the bottom box and they go away.

Go to the Settings Tab. We like to check the top box, and uncheck the last one.

You can see what the program has caught by going to the Quarantine Tab. Feel free to click the Delete All button.

Malwarebytes 1.45 – additional notes about the upgrade:
1. Added new scheduling engine for our customers featuring realtime updating, more finely-grained scheduled scanning/updating, and a streamlined interface.
2. Added new flash scanning option which searches for malicious objects in memory and load point locations.
3. Added compatibility with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for our corporate customers.
4. Added a brand new advanced heuristics detection module named Shuriken that will be integrated into both scanner and protection module.
5. Integrated website blocking options and other customizable policies into the main program interface.
6. Heavily improved command line interface allowing customers to scan and remove automatically and silently.
7. Heavily improved updating module which should solve various updating issues. Also added full proxy support including authentication and integration into the GUI.
8. Fixed a large number of various issues and enhanced overall stability of the scanner and protection module.
9. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a surprisingly effective freeware antimalware tool. It’s a relatively speedy malware remover, with the quick scan taking about 8 minutes even with other high-resource programs running.
10. It supports multiple drive scanning including networked drives, context menu options including a scan-on-demand for individual files, and the FileAssassin option under the More Tools section for removing locked files.
11. Overall, though, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a responsive malware remover that does what it should with a minimum of fuss.

#10 – You should know how to adjust your security settings and limit what non-friends can see. This is actually our most important tip and we wanted to list it first. No one wants the wrong type of people to be looking at pictures of their children. You should also check these settings from time to time – Facebook has done some global changes in the past that changed our settings.

#9 – Kids can lie about their age to sign up for an account which can expose them to child predators.

#8 – Do not join any fan page or group that requires you to enter any kind of personal information, all of these are scams.

#7 – Facebook can occupy/waste a tremendous amount of your time with quizzes, applications, games, or just browsing profiles. It has become an incredible problem for businesses, and many of them block the website (only to have Facebook addicts use their phones to access the site which wastes even more time because it is harder to type).

#6 – Be aware of scams through Facebook chat. For example: somebody could have stolen your friend’s password and asks you for money pretending to be them. (* Part II in this series recaps an actual security problem with chat that was fixed in April)

#5 – Your FB data may be accessible through other routes, like Google. It’s amazing what shows up on Google sometimes. It is also amazing how many employers now use Facebook to review job candidates. That’s another good reason why you should know how to adjust your security settings and limit what non-friends or employers can see; like those Spring Break pictures from Cabo.

#4 – Facebook doesn’t guarantee your privacy. Its own third-party contractors might misuse your information.

#3 – Facebook is not responsible for the security of third-party applications. A malicious application developer could break through Facebook’s security protocols and expose your info. My Space (another other large social network) suffers greatly from this abuse.

#2 – Anything you publish on Facebook is never deleted off of their server even if you delete it in your account.

#1 – Do not fall for the “password reset” email! This mass spam/virus attack comes out about every 3 months. The last one came out in March, 2010 and one of our clients opened the attachment. The virus it contained was incredibly nasty, but luckily we had a tool that easily fixed his PC.

Please do not put anything on Facebook without thinking about it. Once it’s on internet, there are always ways for someone to find it. Software Knowledge gets questions frequently from clients on how to use Facebook. We will recap a few of their main issues in the next article. Please use our Contact Us page if you have a question you’d like us to cover. We would love to hear from you.

PP / SK – May 2010
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