If you were looking to employ someone, you’d carefully check their reputation and their references.  Email providers are now becoming just as cautious about who they accept emails from, in an effort to prevent large volumes of unsolicited commercial email (spam) from moving through their servers.  They’re turning to ‘blacklist’ services, to see if you’ve developed a reputation for being a known source of spam.  Let’s look at blacklisting and how it can put a halt to your legitimate emails. 

There are numerous blacklisting services on the internet, which use various methods to build up a list of known spam sources.  One such method is a ‘honeypot’ – pretending to be an unsecure email system, which attracts spammers and spamming software.  The blacklisting server then adds the internet IP address of where the spam came from, to the blacklist.  Email providers check this blacklist before accepting email and if the sender’s server is on that list, their email may be rejected before the recipients even see it.  This is different to spam filtering which actually checks the contents of the email itself.

Unfortunately, your own business can become blacklisted if one of your computers picks up a spamming software ‘bot’ or malware.  Like a virus, this malicious software installs itself onto your machine and starts sending out spam emails through your internet connection, however it may not be detected by your anti-virus software.  You can very quickly become identified as a spam source and blacklisted, which will prevent legitimate emails from being sent from your own local email server. 

The first indications of blacklisting are usually email failure error messages when you try and send a message.  They commonly refer to rejecting your email for ‘policy reasons’ and may or may not mention spam or blacklisting.  Email addresses that you’ve previously communicated with successfully may now start to reject your messages.

To tackle this, the first step is to confirm which blacklisting services you appear in.  Some services even provide a link in the email failure message with further information on why you were blacklisted, when it happened or the possible cause.  The infected computer then needs to be identified, removed from your network and thoroughly cleaned.  Your email server should also have its configuration checked to ensure it’s not an ‘open’ relay, allowing emails to pass through it which did not come from you and are not destined for you.  Once you’re sure your network is completely clean, you can ask to be ‘delisted’ from the services you’ve been appearing in.  Some services will action your delisting request as soon as they receive it, whereas some will take days or weeks and some services even request a payment to speed up the process for you.  The key to successful delisting is to make sure your computers are completely clean first.  If you make multiple requests to be delisted and you’re still generating spam, the services will start to ignore your requests and you’ll remain on the blacklists. 

Of course, a better option is to prevent spamming malware from entering your network in the first place, so always be cautious about what you download from the internet, what email attachments you open and what website links you click.  Talk to your local Computer Troubleshooters about how to protect your network or for help if you think you’ve been blacklisted.

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The rate of rootkit infections is on the rise. Your average infection is installed on your computer as a program or a service. A rootkit, however, is usually installed as a device driver of some kind. This makes a rootkit much harder to detect and much harder to remove.

The name comes from the UNIX world. In case you aren’t familiar with UNIX, it’s an operating system kind of like Windows, but more geared towards server or business applications. Linux is sort of the workstation version of UNIX. Anyway, in the UNIX world, root is the administrator account. So a rootkit is a kit of software that has root or administrative level access.

If you regularly read our newsletter, you may remember that with Windows Vista and Windows 7, you can get either a 32 bit version of a 64 bit version. There was a 64 bit version of Windows XP, but it was never marketed or sold to consumers. However, the 64 bit version of Windows 7 is very popular. I mention the 32 bit versus 64 bit versions for good reason. While 32 bit software will usually work on a 64 bit system, 32 bit drivers generally will not work on a 64 bit system.

What this means is that in order for a 64 bit system to become infected with a rootkit, the rootkit has to specifically be for 64 bit systems. In the past, rootkits were only 32 bit, causing some people to foolishly believe 64 bit systems were not susceptible to rootkit infections. But recently 64 bit rootkits have begun to surface.

All of this does not change our recommendation on your strategy for protecting your computer. If you run one of our recommended security solutions (http://www.ct-cp.com/?p=797) and make sure that security solution stays up to date and never expires, then you have gone a long way towards preventing a rootkit infection. You should also be vigilant on installing Windows updates as well because these updates usually plug security holes in Windows that can be used to infect your computer.

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Your Internet speed is measured in two ways. Download speed and upload speed. Download speed is how fast information travels from a computer on the internet down to your computer. Upload speed is how fast information can travel from your computer up to another computer on the internet.

Most things we do on the internet require a lot of download speed, but not much upload speed. Websurfing, for example, is mostly download speed. Receiving email is downloading. Sending email is uploading. If you share files and someone downloads a file from you, that’s uploading.

The download speed on your Internet connection is faster than your upload speed. I won’t get into the technical details as to why that is. That’s why it may seem fast when you are surfing the web, but when you send an email with a picture attached, it seems slow.

When you sign up for internet access from your phone company or cable company, they will have different packages you can get that offer different speeds. For example, you can get RoadRunner (from Time Warner Cable) in speeds of .768/.128 mbps, 1.5/.384 mbps, 7/.512 mbps, 15/.756 mbps, and 30/5 mbps. mbps stands for Million Bits Per Second. The first speed is the download speed and the speed after the slash is the upload speed.

What to know what speed you are really getting? Run a test. Just go to www.bandwidthplace.com and run a test. It will tell you what your download and upload speeds are. When you run the test, make sure there is no internet activity on your computer or any other computer on your network or it can skew the test. Also be aware that the advertised speeds are maximum, not average speeds. You should also know that some advertise burst speeds. That means even though you are paying for a download speed of 7 mpbs, it there may be times when it will burst and go faster, depending on network traffic.

For example, here at Computer Troubleshooters, I ran the test. We got a download speed of 14.5 mbps and an upload speed of 1.8 mbps. Our internet service is for 15 mbps download and .756. So the resulting download speed was pretty close to 15, but the upload speed was more than twice as fast as what is advertised thanks to a burst of speed.

By the way, if you run the test, be aware that it may show the results in kbps or mbps. Kbps is thousands and mbps is millions. I showed all of the numbers in this article in mbps. 1 mbps is faster than 512 kbps. 512 kbps is .512 mbps.

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A question we get asked often is how to know when to single-click and when to double-click.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of logic to it. You kind of just have to know. And settings can be changed in Windows to change it. But most people don’t know about these settings, so here are the rules for Windows with the default settings.

Icons on the Windows desktop should be double-clicked.

Icons in the Quick-launch bar (XP or Vista), or on the Windows 7 task bar should be single-clicked.

Anything on the web should be single-clicked.

When you are in Windows Explorer looking at files on your computer, if you want to open one of these files, you would double-click on it.

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On a Computer, a cookie is a small file where a web site can store information. Most cookies are good. They help the website and they help you. However, like any good thing, they can be abused. Cookies can be used to track what you do on the web or even save some information about you. These types of cookies are called tracking cookies.

You can go into your web browsers settings and delete all of your cookies. There are also free utilities that will delete all of your cookies for you. But since most cookies are good, you don’t really want to go and blow away all of your cookies. You only want to blow away the tracking cookies. The good news is that most security software will locate and delete tracking cookies during a scan.

However, there’s something new in the world of cookies. If you have been reading this newsletter very long, you have read about Flash. Flash is an add-on to your web browser which allows a website to do all sorts of cool things. Flash is very common. If you don’t have flash, there are a lot of websites that won’t display properly on your computer. We have also told you in the past how important it is to keep flash up to date for security reasons.

Now, some websites are using a feature in flash to do the same job as tracking cookies. Currently, security software does not find and delete flash cookies. And no utilities I know of can find and delete them either. In addition, you can’t go into your web browser’s options and delete them.

There is something you can do, though. You can run the Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager and tell it not to allow third-party flash content to store data on your computer. Here’s how to do it.

First, go to this link:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html

On the left side, click on “Website Storage Settings panel”

Now you will see a list of all of the flash cookies on your computer. Most of them have names that are cryptic, but some have names you will recognize. Here, you can select one and delete it, or you can delete all of them.

If you want to prevent websites from saving any of this info in the future, then on the left side, click on “Global Storage Settings panel”

Now you will see a box with a checkmark in it and next to that it will say “Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer.”

Click on that box to remove the check mark.

And you’re done!

There may be some drawbacks to changing this setting. For example, if you play an online game that uses flash, it may not be able to save your high score. If you find these drawbacks annoying, you can always go back into the Flash settings manager and change it back.

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Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch with your friends and family. But like anything popular, it can be misused and attacked. If you are like most Facebook users, you wish there was a way to dislike something on Facebook. You can like something, so why can’t you dislike something?

Now there is a new scam that takes advantage of this. So if you see anything about a dislike feature on Facebook, ignore it. It’s a scam! 

In other news, Facebook now lets you share you whereabouts with your friends by letting you “Check in” to a location through Facebook Places. If you’re Like me, you may think, “I would never use that feature so I don’t need to worry about it.” But hold on there. Did you know that your friends can “Check you in” to places? It’s true. If one of your friends checked into a place, they could specify who else is there and they could list you. That is, unless you change some settings on Facebook.

So here is how to prevent others from sharing your location on Facebook.
First, login to your Facebook account and click on Account and then privacy settings. Now click on “Customize Settings”

In the first section which is called “Things I Share”, the last items are “Places I check in” and “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in”. For “Places I check in”, change it to “Only Me”. For the other option, click to remove the checkmark from the box next to Enable.

Now, lastly, go down to the section called “Things others share” and disable “Friends can check me in to Places”.

That’s it!

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If you have Windows XP, take a moment to see which service pack you have.

Find “My Computer” on your desktop. If you can’t find it there, click on start and find it on the start menu. Once you find “My Computer”, right-click on it and choose properties.

The window that comes up will tell you what version of windows you have and will say what the latest service pack that is installed on your computer.

If it says Service Pack 3, you’re good to go. If it says Service Pack 2, then we highly recommend that you upgrade to Service Pack 3 as soon as possible. Why, you ask? Well, for security reasons, of course. Microsoft has ended support for Service Pack 2, so if you have Service Pack 2, you won’t be receiving any more security updates until you install Service Pack 3.

To upgrade, click on “Start” and then click on “All Programs” and then click on “Windows Update”. Once Windows update comes up, click on the express button. If you are a little behind on updates, you might have to do this several times and you will probably have to reboot between updates. But keep updating until there are no more high priority updates. Service Pack 3 will be one of those high priority updates.

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Microsoft released Windows XP in October of 2001. 6 years later, Vista was released in January of 2007. And due to problems with Vista and a bad reputation, two and a half years later, Windows 7 was released in July of 2009.

As of June 2010, Windows is the operating system for about 91% of computers. Mac OS runs about 6% of computers and Linux about 1%.

56% of computers run Windows XP, 18% run Vista, and 16% run Windows 7. Windows XP is by far the dominant operating system. This is primarily because XP was around for 6 years before Microsoft released the next version of Windows (Vista). Vista had a lot of problems when it was first released which caused a lot of people to go back to XP. Windows 7 has done much better than Vista and should do a good job of replacing XP.

Even though Windows 7 has been out less than a year, it has almost caught up to the number of computers with Vista on them, and Vista has been out three and a half years! That says something right there.

“That’s interesting.”, you say, “But why are you telling me this?” I’m telling you because Windows XP has a limited life. Microsoft will stop releasing security updates for Windows XP on August 4, 2014. And that’s important because your security software can’t protect your computer on its own. You need those security updates to help keep your computer from becoming infected.

This message is primarily aimed at Businesses who have a lot of computers and need to plan ahead for replacing them. Four years may seem like a long way away, but it will be here before you know it. That means that in the next 4 years, 56% of computers will need to be upgraded or replaced.

Can you upgrade your XP systems to Windows 7? You can, but we don’t recommend it. Most systems with XP just don’t have the hardware to run Windows 7 well. It will run, but it will be slow. Why upgrade if it’s going to be slower? A few XP systems may be OK with Windows 7, but most will need to be replaced.

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You may be wondering what the difference is between consumer and enterprise security software. There is a big difference. The difference comes in how the software is installed, maintained, and monitored.

Enterprise Security software is targeted towards business and it makes it easy for one person to install, maintain, and monitor security software on many PC’s. In addition, enterprise security software is cheaper, per PC, than it would be to purchase a consumer license for each PC.

Let’s look at an example of the cost using Vipre Enterprise versus the consumer version of Vipre. Let’s say you have a small company with 10 PC’s. To purchase 10 individual licenses of the consumer version of Vipre for 1 year would be about $300. If you purchased a 10 seat license of Vipre Enterprise, it would cost $167.50. That’s about half the cost. In addition, the Enterprise version gives you a central place to install, monitor, and maintain Vipre on all of the PC’s. You don’t have to physically go to each PC to maintain it.

Now that you hopefully see the value in the Enterprise version of security software over consumer versions, you are probably expecting a list of Enterprise security software. But we aren’t going to do that. Of our recommended security software, only one offers an Enterprise version. Vipre. If you own or work at a business that has 5 or more PC’s, we recommend  that you switch to Vipre Enterprise as soon as possible. The security of the computers that run your business is nothing to fool around with. Do yourself, your business, and your employees a favor and switch to Vipre Enterprise as soon as possible.

We can assist you in the installation of Vipre Enterprise. If you don’t have  a server, we can even add  your computers to our Vipre Enterprise and we can also monitor and maintain the security of your system so you don’t have to worry about it.

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