Scientists at University of California, Berkley have actually accomplished this task. They have successfully attached tiny electrodes and other electronic parts on to living insects. Through these implants, the bug can now be maneuvered through a laptop.

The engineering principle behind is not very difficult to understand. Since we human beings can’t exactly one-up nature on engineering, this is a sort of hack in to the system. It’s like installing a malware that takes control of your computer and then the malware creator manipulates your system through the implant.

The bugs are implanted with the electronic parts at the pupal stage or around the time when they retreat inside the pupa. This way, they actually grow up with parts implanted in them. Then when they are fully grown and take flight, the electrodes transmit electrical pulses in to their nervous system and muscles. So in case the controller wants the bug to veer left during flight, the electrodes charge the left  muscles to make them work harder and the body turns left. Is it is just me or does this sound eerily similar to the way human beings were controlled in The Matrix?

The bug that is being shown off at this point is a Beetle. The developers of the system, Hirotaka Sato and Michel Maharbiz, talked to the Neuroscience Magazine and told them that they had successfully demonstrated remote control in free flight through an implantable radio-equipped neural transmitter.

Attempts to do things similar to this have been going on for several years now and it has already been tried on insects like cockroaches. But this the first time ever that man has been able to extend this kind of control on an insect. This is not necessarily a good thing though. However, as with every scientific achievement, what comes off it will depend on how we use it. And the identity of the people who are funding it already gives us a large enough hint as to what the purpose of this project might be.

The project is being funded by the Pentagon. More precisely, it is being funded by the US Defense Research Project Agency (DARPA) and they themselves have been trying to build a Nano Air Vehicle or NAV.

thankfully this is still in the realm of Sci Fi

These NAVs would be small enough (less that 7.6cm and 10g) to go to places undetected and carry out reconnaissance missions in urban areas mainly. Even though we have advanced enough in the field of nano-technology to make the insect-implants, we are still unable to build something like that completely on our own.

So the military hopes that the beetles would act like micro air vehicles and give them unprecedented advantages during war.

Thankfully, nothing like that is possible immediately because the control  implant is all that the insects can carry during flight. Any more weight and they will not be able to lift it with their wings. So things like a camera and a GPS transmitter are still quite far away from being implanted on to these insects, which would be the only way they could be of any use in war. They can still carry chemical and biological weapons but that would violate existing war laws.

It’s funny that they are expected to abide by the law during a war. The developers are saying that this is only the initial stage and practical cyborg insects are anything between two to 10 years away. [BBC news]

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But what can you expect and how should it run? In this preview of Ubuntu 9.10 I will fill you in on the upcoming features and give you a few screen shots as well as my opinion on how the release will fare.

Features

Of course, the first thing you want to know is the feature list. You will be surprised to see the number of features that have been added to 9.10. There are a few cases where some of the features are major changes to the distribution as a whole. Let’s take a look and see.

Upstart: Upstart replaces the /sbin/init daemon which handles the starting of services during the boot process.

Figure 1

Boot process: A brand new boot process has been worked in to make the boot of Ubuntu even faster than it was in 9.04. It is. The boot process for Linux is getting scary fast. Figure 1 shows the new Ubuntu boot screen. The goal of the 10 second start up is growing ever within reach.

Software Center: This is very new and replaces the old Add/Remove Software utility. The ultimate purpose of the Software Center is to replace Synaptic and Gdebi and will, eventually, also offer commercial software.  You can see how different the Software Center is to the

Figure 2

old tool in Figure 2. It is my belief the Software Center is Ubuntu’s attempt to catch on in the Enterprise space. And why shouldn’t they?

After taking a peek around the Software Center, I have to say I am really impressed.

GNOME: GNOME reaches the 2.28 release in the Ubuntu release cycle. The only major change is that GDM has been completely rewritten.

Kubuntu: With this release comes the very first Kubuntu Netbook release.

Enterprise Cloud Images: With the release of 9.10 you will images for use with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that is deployed with Amazon EC2.

Ubuntu One: This is Ubuntu’s version of Dropbox. With Ubuntu One you can keep all of files on your Ubuntu machines in sync with one another. You will have to sign up for an account in order to take advantage of this. You also have to subscribe to Ubuntu One. There are two types of accounts:

• Free: 2 Gigs of storage.
• Paid: 50 Gigs of storage for $10.00 USD per month.

Once you have subscribed you can then install the client software.

Hal deprecation: Our old buddy HAL is being stripped of many of its duties. Gone from HAL will be much of the suspend and hibernate subsystem as well as the handling of storage devices. In its place will be “DeviceKit-power”, “DeviceKit-disks” and “udev”.

New Intel video drivers: The Intel video drivers are moving away from EXA to UXA which will solve major performance issues seen in 9.04 for Intel graphics.

ext4: The ext4 filesystem will now be the default. I have used it on many installations and have found it to be reliable and fast.

Non-eXecutable Emulation: If you have a system that lacks NX hardware, this new system will provide an approximation of the NX hardware.

There have also been a number of security improvements such as:

• Blocking Module Loading: Blocks modules from loading after boot.
• Position Independent Executables: Helps to prevent from unknown threats.
• AppArmor Improvements: Associate more profiles to executable applications.

The results

After using 9.10 for a day I have to say I am impressed. I have been using 9.04 on nearly all of my machines and was wondering how Ubuntu could be improved upon. Well, it seems the developement team has, in fact, improved upon 9.04. It’s not a giant leap forward, but the speed improvements and the new software promises to make the Ubuntu experience one that anyone can enjoy. If you are interested in downloading the pre-release of Ubuntu, you can find it on the Karmic Koala download page.

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Free Fixer will also scan various critical components of a Windows operating system including running processes, autostart entries, Browser Helper Objects or TCP/IP settings. The difference becomes obvious after the report is being displayed on the screen. Free Fixer will for example whitelist critical system files which means that they will not show up in the default report. This is done to decrease the number of entries that are displayed making it easier for the user to concentrate and analyze the remaining items. There is however no way of displaying whitelisted items in the application, something that the developer’s might want to consider integrating in their security software program.

Another important difference is the “more info” link that is displayed next to each item that was found during the scan. A click on the link will open a page (in Internet Explorer) on the developer’s website that is listing information about the specific entry. Files from trusted companies like Apple or Mozilla are highlighted in green giving the user another indication of potentially safe applications and processes.

The program displays delete or repair checkboxes next to each entry that has not been whitelisted or indicated as being trustworthy. Additional information like the system path are displayed for each item which, combined with the link to display more information on a website, can be a great asset of identifying potentially dangerous items quickly.

Free Fixer is compatible with most versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system (including Windows Xp, Windows Vista and Windows 7). A download is provided at the developer’s website.

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The second type are ping and trackback spammers. This is either done by auto-posting articles that others have written without their consent on so called autoblogs. Each post generates at least one pingback to the original site. This can lead to hundreds of pingbacks over time which many webmasters and blog owners publish.

The third and most spammy type are the automated spammers that use specifically designed tools to spam thousands of blogs, forums and every other type of site where content can be posted in hours. Now that we know the different types of spammers we have to discuss how to handle them. This post will mostly deal with automated spammers who post dozens if not hundreds of comments and pingbacks.

Webmasters should use at least one anti-spam tool to block the majority of spam reaching the frontend of the website. Wordpress users can for example use Akismet or one of the several other anti-spam plugins that are available. Still, some spam will come through. Today for example a webmaster decided to copy and post more than 300 articles from Ghacks on a website. Each post generated at least one pingback, many multiple pingbacks as the tags and links were kept by that webmaster.

Akismet did not object to these ping and Ghacks ended up with more than 300 accepted and published pings from that blog. Many webmasters would now delete them one by one which takes quite a while. A far better solution is to filter for a common denominator which in this case was the url of the website. All comments, pings and trackbacks that include the domain name of that website were listed giving me the option to mark them all and send them to the spam folder.

There might be situations where this is not possible. Maybe the website or script does not offer the option to bulk moderate comments. There is however another option if the website is making use of a database. This does however require some knowledge about the database as a query has to be run in the administration. Most users will probably use MySql where a basic delete query looks like this:

delete from [table] where [column name] = 'value'

To delete all comments from a specific url in Wordpress one would do the following:

delete from wp-comments where comment_author_url ='www.example.com'

It is possible to use other table columns like the commenters IP or email for example. How do you handle mass spam to your website or blog?

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This article will concentrate on two lesser known free spyware removal tools. The first program is called Roguefix. It has been designed to counter so called rogue applications. The tool has been specifically designed to remove rogue scanners, desktop and homepage hijackers, trojans, codecs and miscellaneous malware.

Roguefix comes as a simple batch file that has to be executed in Windows safe mode.

The tool will then scan the operating system for spyware and remove detected spyware automatically from the computer system. The free spyware cleaner is only compatible to the Windows XP operating system according to the software developer.

SmitfraudFix on the other hand can scan a Windows XP or Windows 2000 operating system directly. The user needs to boot into safe mode for the removal process though. The program will generate a report after the scan which will list all the malicious files found after the spyware scan.

Both tools have been designed to detect and remove rogue applications only which does limit their usefulness in day to day spyware scans. It is however a good idea to have them at hand in case the computer system gets infected by rogue spyware.

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Windows Defender comes with the usual options to automatically update the program and schedule regular system scans to protect the computer system. Default actions for low, medium and high alerts can be defined that will be executed by the anti-spyware program automatically.

Microsoft’s anti-spyware solution comes with the interesting advanced tool Software Explorer which can display extensive information about startup programs, currently running programs, network connected programs and Winsock service providers.

Each program and provider is sorted by company which makes it easier to find non-Microsoft programs that are running or connected to the computer system.

Microsoft has improved Windows Defender over the years. The company did receive lots of criticism in the beginning which can be attributed to a low spyware detection rate. Several anti-spyware products have performed better in tests, outlined here or here. Please note that the tests linked in this article have been performed about 10 months ago and that the situation may have changed in the mean time.

Which leads to the question: Are you running anti-spyware software? If so which?

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It is therefor always a good precaution to backup the Master Boot Record to be able to restore it. This could be handy before installing another operating system or in case the Master Boot Record gets corrupted another way.

HD Hacker is a portable software compatible with Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista that can be used to backup and restore the Master Boot Record or any other sector the user specifies. It offers the option to select the drive by drive letter or physical drive.

The software supports two read and write operations. A sector can be read from disk or file and can be saved to disk or file as well. To backup the Master Boot Record one would Read the boot sector from disk and save it to file afterwards. This ensures that the Master Book Record can be recovered anytime in case something should alter or corrupt it.

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It definitely was an exciting week and I had to update lots of the installed applications on my Windows XP system.

The update of this week award goes to my favorite desktop search application Locate32. I just like it that much and think that it is definitely one of the most efficient ways to search for files and contents in Windows.

µTorrent 1.8 Build 11549 RC5 – new version of the lightweight and excellent Bittorrent client.

7-Zip 4.59 Alpha 5 – one of the most popular unpackers and archivers for Windows that supports all the popular archiving formats.

AIMP 2.5 Build 264 RC2 – a mp3 player that stands it ground against Winamp and XMPlay.

Autoruns 9.31 – probably the most professional software when it comes to analysing the startup settings in Windows.

BitComet 1.03 – another popular Bittorrent client.

CDBurnerXP Pro 4.1.2.745 – another application for burning CDs and DVDs in Windows.

CodecInstaller 2.10.1 – displays the installed codecs on the system and can analyse multimedia files telling the user which codecs they need to be played correctly.

doPDF 6.1.269 – creates a virtual printer that can create pdf documents out of other text formats.

FileZilla 3.1.0 RC2 – Open Source ftp client that is also available for Linux and Mac OSX.

Flock 2.0 Beta 2 – a new version of this social browser based on Mozilla Firefox.

Fresh UI 8.11 – a solid tweaker for Windows.

ImgBurn 2.4.2.0 – simple fast and elegant burning software that is compatible with most things that you throw at it.

IrfanView 4.20 – IrfanView is probably the most popular image viewer out there right now.

JavaRa 1.10 – provides a download of the latest Java Runtime Environment and an option to clean the system from older versions.

Joost 1.1.8 Beta – have not heard much about Joost lately. Still needs better content to compete against other Internet TV solutions.

Locate 3.1.8.7200 RC1 – probably the fastest most efficient way to search in Windows.

MediaCoder 0.6.1.4140 – MediaCoder is a free universal audio/video batch transcoder, putting together lots of excellent audio/video codecs and tools from the open source community into an all-in-one solution

nLite 1.4.8 – create a installation disk for Windows XP by removing unneeded components and adding needed ones.

Notepad++ 5.0.2 – a notepad replacement with advanced functionality.

Opera 9.52 Build 10092 Beta – The Opera developers are releasing so many Beta versions, incredible.

Orbit Downloader 2.7.2 – one of the best – in my opinion – download manager for Windows that provides the user with lots of options.

Pixelformer 0.8.2.1 Beta – an advanced icon designer.

SpeedFan 4.35 Beta 21 – check system temperatures and control system fans to reduce noise.

Spyware Terminator 2.3.0.481 – efficient tool to remove spyware and adware from the system.

Sysinternals Suite Build 07/16/08 – this famous software package contains all the programs from Sysinternals.

System Explorer 1.5 Beta 4 – provides access to some detailed system information like processes, services and connections similar to Process Explorer.

TAME 1.0 Build 321 Beta 2 – a backup solution that kicks in whenever a monitored application closes down.

TestDisk 6.11 Beta – a bootable data recovery CD.

UpdateStar 2.2.614 Beta – scans the system for software updates and provides links to those updates.

VirtualDub 1.8.3 Build 29896 – excellent software to work with video files. A video capture / processing utility.

Vista Codec Package 4.7.2 – Adds support for several multimedia formats that are not supported by default by Windows Vista.

Weather Watcher 5.6.32 – a software that can be used to get the weather forecast for a specific region in the world.

Xfire 1.95 – the gamer’s Instant Messenger. See what your buddies are playing, chat with them and join their games.

XnView 1.94 – a fast image viewer and basic editor for Windows.

xpy 0.10.7.1 – turn off some features and default threats of Windows XP.

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That’s how file recovery programs like Recuva operate. They scan the hard drive for those deleted files and have a good chance of recovering them. The chance is better for newly deleted files because the chance is lower that their sectors on the hard drive have been overwritten by other files.

You will hopefully agree with us that it is highly impracticable to wait until the file has been overwritten by other files to make sure that it cannot be recovered by normal means.

One solution is to use so called File Wipers and DP Secure Wiper by Dirk Paehl is one of them. It provides three different methods of deleting a file permanently so that it cannot be recovered anymore.

Single Overwrite: This is the fastest way of deleting a file. File Recovery Programs that are freely available on the Internet will not be able to recover the file anymore.
lDoD Wipe: Department of Defense compliant wiping. The file will be overwritten seven times.
Gutmann’s Method: It will overwrite the file with 35 different patterns.

DP Secure Wiper works by dragging and dropping files or folders into the program window. The one thing that is missing in our opinion is a context menu entry that sends files directly to the application.

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A short explanation for those that never followed one of my software updates articles before. I collect information about software updates and compile a list of all applications that have been updated in the last seven days every Wednesday. Only software that has been mentioned before here at Ghacks will be included in the list to make sure that it consists exclusively of high quality free applications.

The application of the week is Opera 9.5 beta 2 simply because I think it’s time to push Opera to become the third browser with a bigger market share. The browser deserves that spot and should have a marketing share of at least 25% and not the 5% or so that it has now.

µTorrent 1.8 Build 9704 Beta – lightweight Bittorrent client.

Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0.22.349 – a great firewall for Windows. I don’t use one but if you do give this one a try.

Damn Small Linux 4.3 – a reliable small Linux distribution.

DC++ 0.706 Beta – new Direct Connect beta, a file sharing application.

doPDF 6.0.259 – create pdf documents by sending text documents to a virtual printer.

FeedDemon 2.6.1.4 RC2 – RSS reader for the desktop.

FileZilla 3.0.9.2 – Open Source ftp client.

FlashGot 0.9.7 -provides download manager integration into Firefox.

foobar2000 0.9.5.2 – highly configurable music player.

fsLock 2.0 Build 872 Beta 5 – protect files and processes on your system by “locking” them.

IObit SmartDefrag 5.01 Beta – defragmentation tool that works in the background whenever the computer is idle.

Joomla! 1.5.3 – is an Open-Source content management system.

MediaCoder 0.6.1.4098 – audio and video transcoder.

MediaMonkey 3.0.3.1162 RC3 – music manager and player.

Miro 1.2.3 – excellent media player with RSS and video portal integration.

Mp3tag 2.41 – new version of this great mp3 tagger.

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 – another highly popular Linux distribution.

Opera 9.50 Build 9945 Beta 2 – finally Beta 2 of Opera 9.5

phpMyAdmin 2.11.6-rc1 – great frontend to administrate mysql databases.

Process Monitor 1.32 – advanced process monitoring tool.

Real Alternative Regular 1.7.9 Beta – play Real Media files without having to install Real Player.

Recuva 1.13.304 – excellent software to recover accidentally deleted files.

Soundbase 2008.4.18 – music manager and player.

Spamihilator 0.9.9.41 – excellent spam catcher that observes the mail accounts and fights spam before it reaches your inbox.

SpeedFan 4.34 – check temperatures and regulate fans. I use it to lower the fan speed to soften the noise of my computer.

TagScanner 5.0 Build 520 – one of the best mp3 taggers.

Ubuntu 8.04 – the most popular Linux distribution these days.

Vista Codec Package 4.6.4 – add all needed codecs to play the popular audio and video formats in Windows Vista.

WinMerge 2.9.9.1 Experimental – compare and merge text documents.

XnView 1.93.6 Beta 3 – popular fast image viewer.

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I personally do not install software like this especially if it has Norton / Symantec or McAfee written on it. Still this might be useful for some and it is free after all. Here are the steps that you need to do: (Thanks to Raymond for finding another great offer)

Visit the Natwest website and click on the huge banner at the bottom saying Free PC Security, Protect your PC for 12 months with McAfee VirusScan Plus. This will lead you to a McAfee website that has a Register Now button. Click on that button and fill out the registration form.

McAfree VirusScan Plus 2008 Features

• Safe Search, Safe Surf. McAfee® SiteAdvisor™ adds ratings to websites to help you avoid online dangers.
• Home License Subscription Service. Automatically delivers the latest software features and threat updates and lets you easily manage security subscriptions for all your PCs.
• Stops Viruses. Blocks and removes viruses and even stops them before they even get to your PC.
• Stops Hackers. Protects and conceals your computer from hackers.
• Blocks Spyware. Blocks spyware before it installs on your computer and removes existing spyware.
• Improves PC Health. Cleans clutter off your computer so it stays healthy and secure.

It requires your name, email and a password. You might want to uncheck the options below the form so that you do not subscribe to those newsletters. Click on the I Agree button to proceed and in the next window on the Go To My Account button.

This should load the account window and you should see the McAfee VirusScan Plus 2008 subscription in a table on that page. A download / install button is available in the same row, click that button to download the file DMSetup.exe and execute it when the download is finished.

You should be automatically logged into your account, if not the option is given in the tool. Just click on the Download button to download the real product which takes a while. Once the download is completed you click on Install to install the product.

The Register Now link is not working all the time. My first test through up an error message. Just try it again and it should work afte all.

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The widgets are called desklets in Avedesk and you can create them in the Desklets > Add menu. It might look confusing at first glance but it is not once you grasp the concept. The first step is to add a desklet using the menu above. You can choose from seven available ones including Drives, Folders, FTP and Shortcuts.

Adding a desklet does nothing more than to make it available in the main interface of Avedesk where you can configure it. Lets take a closer look at the folder desklet for instance. You can change the name of it, the appearance, the label, the format of the label, the image and of course the folder that should be accessible.

Let us explore this a bit more. You can define the size of the icon and the icon that should be displayed. As you can see in the screenshot above I decided to create some ridiculously huge items. You can define a position on screen for each icon and lock that position.

The label is the text below the name of the desklet. Its appearance can be changed as well. You can change the font, colors, position, alignment and format. The standard folder label displays information about files and folders inside the selected folder. Several variables can add new information like the folder size to the label. Oh, and it is possible to hide the label and make it visible when you move the mouse over the icon.

One interesting desklet is the ftp desklet. You can drag and drop files to an ftp using that desklet which – of course – has to be configured before usage. The appearance of that desklet can be changed as well and the icon changes depending on the current status.

I can see several uses for Avedesk. One would be to position icons on the desktop and lock them in that place another to simply beautify drive and folder shortcuts. You can create a huge Recycle Bin if you happen to miss it all the time.

Only the last link to the application was working when I tried, all other mirrors returned a 404 not found or redirected to a parking page.

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It is aimed at novice users who suspect that something is wrong with their computer but do not have the knowledge to interpretate and fix the issues by themselves. The Classic Mode is giving the user more information and a way to quickly fix common problems. It does not provide full information like the Expert Mode that displays lots of information.

Users of all three modes can always use a service called Online Malware Analysis which can be of great help. It compares the MD5 hash of the scanned files on the user’s system with those in the Runscanner database. MD5 hashes have to be the same if the same unaltered program version is used.

The Online Malware Analysis uses green, purple and red icons to rate the item. Green items are checked and safe, purple items are not yet checked and red items are not safe.

This is a great way of getting more information about current services, programs and processes on your system without having to consult another person.

Runscanner has several features that make it stand out even more. It offers right-click options to compare the MD5 hash with authority websites like Castle Cops and File Advisor, perform a Google search on the item, upload the file to Virus Total and open the file folder and Registry location.

Another aspect that is worth mentioning are so called Run files. As I said earlier novice users can create a log file that they can send to experts who analyze it. These experts can create a so called Fun file specifically designed to be run in Runscanner. The novice user can load the run file and execute the fixes that the expert has authorized.

Oh, it is free of course and portable. You can run it from any location on your computer.

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Malewarebytes Anti-Malware is a software currently in Beta that has an easy to use interface. Users can either quick scan their computer which scans only the hard drive of the operating system and Registry or fully scan their system with the choice of selecting the hard drives that should be scanned.

The quick scan finished on my main Windows XP partition in under 3 minutes while the full scan of all of my hard drives took completed in roughly 30 minutes. Neither scan did find any malware on my computer and I personally find it hard to judge the effectiveness of Anti-Malware.

The main disadvantage of Anti-Malware is in my opinion the non-existent realtime protection which is only available in the Pro version. This is a major drawback and makes the product inferior to other free anti-spyware applications.

It still seems to be pretty useful if you want to scan a system quickly considering that it uses less resources during the scan. CPU in the task manager for instance never went up above 20% while Spybot for instance was always using 65%+.

The beta version of Malewarebytes Anti-Malware is only available in the forums of the homepage with new versions being released every 2-3 days.

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According to their statistics which are updated when scanning computers 10.90% of all PCs scanned were infected. PCs with Antivirus installed had a infection rate of 8.62% while PCs without Antivirus were infected 14.56% of the times.

Infected or Not displays the rate of infected PCs using a Google Maps mashup. France for instance is the country in Europe with the highest amount of infected PCs (16.41%) while Sweden (4.17%) and Germany (5.33%) have the least amount of infections. The United States has an infection rate of 10.34 btw.

The scan works with Firefox after installing an add-on which can only be uninstalled from the default installation location which is at C:\Program Files\Panda Security\NanoScan. Execute the file nanounst.exe to uninstall it again.

Antivir reported a trojan during installation and execution which can be considered a false positive. In case you are wondering why I have Antivir installed, I did not test this from my main computer.

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After clicking Start Play the image of a women on the left side and a captcha on the right is displayed. The program asks the user to enter the captcha to see another picture of the woman with less clothes on. After entering the captcha correctly and clicking on enter the Trojan loads another picture and captcha asking the user again to type the correct code to see Melissa strip even more.

You might have already guessed that the captcha is actually the captcha of another website, Yahoo for instance, and the Trojan uses the help of users to enter those captchas correctly on those websites. Captchas are used to tell human users from bots apart and make it more difficulty to create automatic process to signup or submit data.

The Trojan does not seem to cause harm on the users system. It simply uses him to create correct responses to captcha codes that are used to create accounts on websites like Yahoo Mail.

Trend Micro reports that the Trojan most likely arrives as a file downloaded by other malware on the system. It could also be send as an email attachement.

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He experienced slow downs even when no downloads were in the queue which are indicators that something is not right. Ghacks to the rescue. I decided to investigate orbitnet.exe and see what I can find. I remembered a setting in the options of Orbit Downloader that could have something to do with this behavior.

I opened Tools > Preferences and scanned all options for a sign of Orbitnet. I found it in the Accelerate menu. Enable Orbitnet to accelerate downloads is checked by default, as is Use mirror connections to accelerate download speed and Try to download from P2P and mirror sources when the target url does not exist.

Orbit Downloader uses Orbitnet to accelerate download speed which is based on p2p and auto mirroring search technology. If Orbitnet is disabled, you will get (the) file from source only and can’t get accelerated download speed via Orbitnet.

I disabled this options when I configured Orbit Downloader because I do not use mirrors and did not want to use P2P to download the files that I send to the download manager. The easiest way to get rid of this task is to uncheck Enable Orbitnet to accelerate download speed.

Close and Restart Orbit Downloader afterwards and you will see that the orbitnet.exe process is not listed in the task manager anymore.

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If, and only if, the user executes the file his computer becomes infected with the w32/Ramex.A virus which uses Skype’s public API to access the infected pc. Many antivirus companies like Symantec, Kaspersky and F-Secure have already updated their virus definitions to detect and remove the worm.

It is however also possible to remove the worm manually by following the steps outlined below:

1. Restart the PC in safe mode
2. Run regedit
3. Go to HKLM/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/runonce find entry with mshtmldat32.exe. Delete this entry.
4. Go to Windows\System32 directory and delete following files: wndrivs32.exe, mshtmldat32.exe, winlgcvers.exe, sdrivew32.exe
5. Go to windows/system32/drivers/etc
6. Find file hosts
7. Open it with notepad, ctrl+a and delete all entries (this will resume your antivirus updates), save, close.
8. Restart the PC.

via Skype blog

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Backdoors and Trojans were found on 3,5 million unique computers which means that a backdoor trojan was active in 62% of the infected computers. Rootkits have been found in 14% of all infected computers with 6% identified as the Sony BMG Rootkit. About 80% of the computers were newly infected ones while 20% were computers that had been infected before.

I think Microsoft presents some interesting stats. The tool itself scans for only a fraction of circulating malware and was still able to clean a large number of scanned computers. It´s alarming that 20% of the computers were infected more than once which seems to suggest that their owners did not learn from past errors.

Microsoft should think about an education program released with the software removal tool educating the users of infected pcs what went wrong and how they could secure their computers to prevent an infection in the future.

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Whenever you open up a website that has a ad link on it it changes the hostname of the ad to the one of your computer, which means of course the ad cannot be found and thus not displayed. Its an easy trick. I would be cautious nevertheless, a list of 40000 is not easy to maintain and overlook and it could be that hosts are in that list that you want to have displayed. I´d suggest you take a look and see for yourself, maybe add only some ads to your hostfile from sites that you visit a lot.

They have a nice faq on that site which answers lots of basic questions e.g. uninstallation, download, install etc. Pretty good site.

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