Free Online Scanner

I ran across another free online scanner, this one is from F-Secure. It took a little longer than other online scanners to download and run the components, but it did a good job finding some tracking cookies that other scanners did not mark as malicious. Again, if you don't run anti-virus software for whatever reason, using free online scanners on occasion helps to ensure your being a good citizen of the Internet.

F-Secure Online Scanner

ICMP types

Here are some of the common ICMP types used to discover a host on a network. You can get complete descriptions of ICMP types from RFC 792.

Message Type: 0 - Echo Reply
Message Type: 3 - Destination Unreachable
Message Type: 4 - Source Quench
Message Type: 5 - Redirect
Message Type: 8 - Echo
Message Type: 11 - Time Exceeded
Message Type: 12 - Parameter Problem
Message Type: 13 - Timestamp
Message Type: 14 - Timestamp Reply
Message Type: 15 - Information Request
Message Type: 16 - Information Reply

While ICMP might be useful for a network administrator to know what is going on it is also useful for a hacker to know what is going on. Denying ICMP requests from outside your network is one way to help deter hackers.

XP Internet Security 2010

I worked on a machine tonight with the virus XP Internet Security 2010. This thing is a pain just like it's predecessors.

Most instructions out there to manually clean the virus ask you to look for and kill the av.exe process and files and then go out and delete a handful of registry entries. The machine I was working on had those same registry entries, but instead of av.exe it was using MSASCui.exe.

So when trying to fix a machine that has been infected with XP Internet Security 2010 you should now be aware of at least two exe files it's using.

av.exe
MSASCui.exe

More variants are sure to follow.

From My Bookmarks

McAfee Free Services

This is a nice site with a handful of useful tools to scan, test, and keep you up to date with what is going on with Internet security.

A New Look

I have always believed in keeping this blog simple and clutter free. However, I've been running this blog for a while now and frankly got tired of looking at it. Lets face it, it's dull.

I chose this new template because it is still minimalistic, but not boring.

Enjoy