Twitter account hacked

Recently I have had about six DM's from people saying "Hi someone is saying horrible rumours about you.." it is then followed by a link.

As there seems to be more of this happening, I have got this link below from twitter which has the steps to follow if you think your account has been compromised.  I hope this helps out, I have tried to contact some of the people who have been compromised, a couple replied and thanked me for trying to help the other just ignored it.

https://support.twitter.com/groups/33-report-a-violation/topics/122-reporting-violations/articles/31796-my-account-has-been-compromised#

I am always interested in your thoughts so if you have any comments or feedback then please feel free to add any comments, or you can mail me  here.

Flashback Trojan

This post is a bit later than planned due to my recent arrival, but I still thought I would post it out there.  There has been a bit a press recently about the Flashback Trojan on many Macs.

Originally the piece I had read on the register was claiming there are as many as 550,000 infected machines.

The best article I saw on the detecting and removing the trojan was on F-Secure.

Initially if you run the commands you can see below, if you get the same output then you are not infected by the Trojan.  

Macintosh-3:~ craigdba$ defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment

2012-04-05 19:26:16.700 defaults[25533:707] 

The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info, LSEnvironment) does not exist

Macintosh-3:~ craigdba$ defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

2012-04-05 19:27:24.648 defaults[25535:707] 

The domain/default pair of (/Users/craigdba/.MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist 

If you do get replies then you will want to read the article in the link from F-Secure, or apply the latest software updates from Apple which does contain a Java security update.  Apple has said in the text that it is for the Trojan, plus today I see an article on The Register which now says the number of machines has dropped to 270,000.

I am always interested in your thoughts so if you have any comments or feedback then please feel free to add any comments, or you can mail me  here. 

Stop Google using your access point

I am sure everyone remembers the scandal before when the google street view cars where collecting wifi access point information, a genuine mistake they called it !!. Well you can stop google collecting information about your base stations, or prevent them using them as a way to pinpoint locations using nearby wifi base stations.

All you need to do is change the name of your SSID to add _nomap, so if your SSID was Dagobah it will now be named Dagobah_nomap. This is a major pain if I'm honest why shoudl users have to make changes, this kind of issue should really be "opt-in".  If you are concerned about google collecting information and using your base station then you may want to consider it.

Google has detailed this on their blog, you can read that post here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/greater-choice-for-wireless-access.html

I am always interested in your thoughts so if you have any comments or feedback then please feel free to add any comments, or you can mail me  here. 

iPad 2 and iOS5 Security flaw

I heard about this over the weekend, so I thought I would try it out to see how bad this is. First off this only affects the iPad 2 running iOS5. To test this out for your self you will need to have passcode set on your iPad and a Smart Cover case, which I am assuming is the majority of iPad 2 owners out there. Steps to reproduce this are

Click to read more ...

Mac Malware

There has been quite a few reports recently of people being hit by this malware for the Mac called "Macdefender".  One way some users are being caught out is by having a check box ticked in Safari which will automatically open "Safe Files" after they have been downloaded.

As Safari says Safe files include movies, pictures, sounds, PDF and text documents, and disk images and other archives.

One simple way you can stop this happening is to untick the box.  Open Safari, Click Safari, Preferences then under the General Tab remove the tick in the box at the bottom.  See the image below (Apologies for the dodgy arrow)

This will still download the file but then it will not automatically mount the disk image to install the application. 

On the mac you are always prompted for the Admin password if you want to install any software, if you are unsure why you are being prompted for the admin password, then click cancel and don't proceed with the installation.

This is very basic change which all users should set within Safari.

I am always interested in feedback so feel free to add any comments, or you can mail me  here.

Update on Saturday, May 28, 2011 at 9:53AM by Craig Richards

A quick follow up to the post about Mac Defender malware.  Apple have published a knowledge base article about how you can remove the Malware if you have been affected by it.

You can read the article here