Avedesk was mentioned on one of my favorite websites Donation Coder and it sounded so incredible that I had to give it a try immediately. One could say that Avedesk adds widgets to your desktop, not the kind of useless widgets like the clock in Windows Vista. I’m talking about widgets that look great and provide enough functionality to justify their presence on the desktop.

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.

continue reading "Pimp up your desktop with Avedesk"

Runscanner is a security scanner much like Hijack This but aims to be helpful for all kinds of users. It has three different modes depending on the experience level of the user, they are called Beginner, Classic and Expert Mode. The Beginner Mode scans the system and writes the results in a log file that can be given to security experts in various forums that are mentioned on the Runscanner homepage.

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.

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If you ask computer users about the anti-spyware software that they have installed to protect their system they will most likely name Spybot Search and Destroy or Ad-Aware. Those are the most commonly used anti-spyware programs. Some would probably name Windows Defender from Microsoft or Spyware Terminator or some commercial products.

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.

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I’m not that fond of online virus scanners because they always need special file access privileges and scan your files which could be a privacy issue as well. Infected or Not from Panda Antivirus however catched my attention by providing interesting statistics about infected computers on a worldwide and country wide scale.

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.

continue reading "Infected or Not: Is your PC Infected ?"

I bet you have never seen such a tempting Trojan before. The Trojan named Melissa Strip, identified as TROJ_CAPTCHAR.A by TrendMicro and Trj/RompeCaptchas.A by Panda, starts by asking the user if he wants to play a game where she (Melissa) will strip for the user if the enters the correct code.

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.

continue reading "Melissa Strip Captcha Breaker Trojan"