“Chick Chat: Cyber news mixed for residents of Memphis” plus 2 more |
- Chick Chat: Cyber news mixed for residents of Memphis
- Analyst's View: How to Catch a Virus
- The Procrastinator's Guide to PC Maintenance
| Chick Chat: Cyber news mixed for residents of Memphis Posted: 17 May 2010 10:04 PM PDT Memphis residents are less susceptible to cyber crime than residents in other large cities, according to a recent study. The antivirus software company Norton ranked the Bluff City No. 48 out of 50 in its "Riskiest Online Cities Report." Seattle held the top spot on the list of risky cities, followed by Boston and Washington. Other areas in the top 10 included the Southern cities of Raleigh, N.C.; Atlanta and Austin, Texas, which ranked fifth, sixth and ninth, respectively. "According to the Norton research, Atlanta residents experience the most cyber attacks and potential infections," the report said. The study is based on the company's troubleshooting data and information about computer usage in various cities. Although the findings appear positive for Memphis, the report is a mixed bag. Hotspots and wireless connections are common targets for hackers and online identity thieves. Since Memphis has fewer WiFi locations per capita than cities like Seattle and Raleigh, there are also fewer opportunities for criminals to hack into nonsecure Internet connections. Musicians wanted In an effort to learn more about the religious music tradition that thrives in the Mid-South, student researchers from the University of Mississippi are seeking to interview local residents involved in making and promoting religious music. The research is part of the annual Field School for Cultural Documentation sponsored by the University's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the American Music Archives at the Ford Center in Oxford and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington. Dr. David Taylor, head of research and programs for the Folklife Center, said the religious music scene in West Tennessee and North Mississippi is part of the "tapestry of our national culture" that deserves more attention. "It's really an understudied subject in comparison to the blues," said Taylor. "The gospel music scene, for example, one important aspect of the religious music scene of this region, is just as fabulous. It's just as full of distinctive artistry and powerful performances and interesting people and that's been a very dramatic discovery." This is the fourth summer researchers have participated in the program and they will add the recorded interviews and other information collected to the growing special collection archives at the Ole Miss library. Dr. David Wharton, head of the documentary studies program at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, said many of the existing interviews feature Christian quartets and gospel musicians. "We've also done some sacred harp music, which is sort of a distinct genre in its own right, but we're open to other genres as well," he said. For more information about the collection or to participate in an interview this week, contact Wharton at (662) 915-5993 or dwharton@olemiss.edu. Cathryn Stout, a native Memphian, is a former reporter for The Commercial Appeal. She is in graduate school at the University of Mississippi. Got a topic, good book or event you think will interest local women? Contact her at 529-2320 or memphischickchat@gmail.com. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Analyst's View: How to Catch a Virus Posted: 16 May 2010 05:00 PM PDT Real-world testing of antivirus software's ability to clean up your computer means using live viruses. Here's how we keep our collection up to date. There's nothing quite like the hands-on, gritty experience of installing antivirus software and challenging it to clean up a test system that's dripping with malware such as viruses, spyware, worms, Trojans, and so on. Sure, the independent testing labs put most products through exhaustive static tests, and I do peruse those reports in the course of an evaluation. But reviewing a chart of results just can't compare with watching the product succeed (or fail) at rooting out real-world malware. As part of every security suite and antivirus product review, I install the software on a set of test systems infested with known malware and carefully observe how well the app identifies and wipes out the threats. Each test starts from the same virtual machine snapshot, so each product has the exact same mess to clean up. When the product has finished, I use tools of my own devising to check whether known malware traces were successfully removed. Every year I throw out my samples and bring in a brand-new set. Gathering and analyzing new samples is an arduous task, but definitely worthwhile. Ask the Experts Next I collect the files themselves. I've written a simple program that takes a list of URLs as input and attempts to download each, reporting on whether or not it succeeded. Success is not guaranteed; a URL that's valid today may be defunct tomorrow. And indeed, each time I run this program, I find that a number of the samples have already vanished. The Sport of Malware Watching Process Explorer from SysInternals (now a Microsoft division), reports on all file and Registry activity in painful detail. Process Explorer watches every process, including Windows components and processes unrelated to the malware sample, so it logs a huge amount of information. I can't just set it to filter out activity not directly caused by the malware installer, because the installer might well launch other processes or even take control of an existing process. I need a little help to figure out which changes truly relate to my malware sample and sub-processes it may have launched. PC Armor helps me home in on system changes specific to the malware sample under analysis. PC Armor keeps a real-time record of file and Registry activity related to program installations, ignoring most ongoing activity by already-installed programs and Windows components. For yet another view I run PCMag's own InCtrl5. This utility snapshots the file system and Registry before and after the malware installation. By comparing the two snapshots, InCtrl5 can generate a list of what changed. Process Monitor's log reports when a file is created even if that file gets deleted later in the process, while InCtrl5's list of added traces strictly represents files and Registry items that are still present. Malware that uses rootkit technology may hide from some of these tools, so I also run Rootkit Revealer (another SysInternals product). As the name suggests, this product just reveals rootkit activity; it doesn't attempt removal. I run it with a command-line switch that tells it to scan, write a log file, and quit. For a second opinion I rely on Panda Anti-Rootkit, which is very effective at detecting rootkits but doesn't produce the kind of log file I need. To manage all of these tools, I wrote a simple program that launches them all in the proper order, collates the resulting data, and writes a master log file for each threat. Sifting the Data Each completed analysis appends information to a database linking file and Registry traces to the corresponding sample. Another of my little programs, a very important one, reads that database and flags every file and Registry trace that's now present on the system. For each threat, it summarizes the executable files, data files, and Registry traces found. It also checks to see if any of the executable files are actually running in memory. For a sanity check, I run this tool on a totally clean system to make sure I didn't include any traces that don't belong. When it's time to make the final decision as to which samples I'll include, I use an Excel spreadsheet to make sure I include suggestions from all the vendors and keep a good mix of malware types. All that remains is to apportion the samples into virtual-machine testbeds, no more than four apiece. I try to avoid putting two threats of the same type on a single system and also work to give each system a mix of large and small samples. With all the systems ready, I run a final test to make sure my malware-checking program correctly detects the malware traces I know are present. Sanity Check A few samples from the new collection weren't caught by any of the three. I checked those at VirusTotal, a website that reports whether 42 different anti-malware solutions consider a particular file to be malicious. That last check eliminated a couple of samples that had made it all the way to the end. If all 42 products give the file a clean bill of health I'm not going to argue! Over the years, I've worked out a system for translating each product's performance into a numeric score that reflects how thoroughly it cleaned up the test systems or how well it prevented malware from infesting a clean system. Those scores feed into a monster Excel spreadsheet that lets me view and compare the various products. As you can see, catching viruses and preparing a new malware collection takes considerable effort. It really pays off, though. I get real-world experience with security products that can't be had in any other way. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| The Procrastinator's Guide to PC Maintenance Posted: 17 May 2010 10:05 AM PDT As you undoubtedly know, you're supposed keep your files backed up, your applications up-to-date, and your antivirus software current. Unfortunately, you are--to speak frankly--too lazy to do these tasks as thoroughly and regularly as you should, and too cheap to shell out for add-ons that would do it for you automatically. How do I know? Because...we have a lot in common. But we don't have to reinvent ourselves to get things under control. Here are a few tricks you can use to keep up on your basic PC maintenance without breaking a sweat. Ditch Windows XP If you still use Windows XP, your operating system expects you to perform a few more maintenance tasks than later Windows versions do. Defragmenting your hard drive, for instance, is automatically scheduled in Windows 7 and Vista but has to be done manually in XP (right-click the drive name in My Computer, select Properties, Tools, and choose Defragment Now). Regrettably, Windows 7 isn't free--Home Edition costs $100 at this writing--and though it's the best Microsoft OS I've ever used, it might be out of your price range. Also, if you're on an older PC, slogging through the upgrade process might not be worth it (though we have plenty of Windows 7 upgrade tips if you want to give it a shot). On the other hand, defragmenting a 1TB hard drive doesn't yield the same performance benefits that performing the same operation on a smaller, slower hard drive used to provide--and those performance benefits were fairly minor to begin with. So, assuming your PC is recent enough to read this article, you'll probably be okay putting off defragging. Lazy Backups With Dropbox We have plenty of great how-to articles explaining different backup strategies and backup plans; but if external drives and thoughts of drive images make your eyes glaze over, they won't help. Instead, think about what you have on your PC that you'd miss if you lost it. For example, if you have irreplaceable photos on your PC that you need to back up, but you don't want to spend the time or money required to back them up to a DVD or external drive, consider storing them in a Flickr account, a Picasa Web album, or even a Facebook album. All of those options are free (though some services will charge for storage or monthly upload bandwidth beyond a specified limit), and they all have auto-upload functions to keep your photo backups going. Picasa users can do this automatically with Picasa Web Albums, while Flickr and Facebook users should check out Foldr Monitr for Flickr and LiveUpload to Facebook. When it comes to documents, the main items I want to back up are my work-related documents (old article drafts, mostly), so I don't need to buy terabytes of storage. In fact, I don't even need to buy a USB flash drive. I simply signed up for a Dropbox Basic account--which gives users 2GB of free online storage--and copied my whole Work Stuff folder over to it. That doesn't always work, however, because I have a handful of high-res image files scattered among the Word docs, and they would eventually use up all of the space in my free Dropbox account. Rather that shell out $10 a month or so to increase my space allotment, I periodically do a quick search for every Word file on my hard drive (by searching for *.doc) and drag the files into a new folder on Dropbox. Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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