We all know the risks (or do we?) of plugging things into a PC such as flash drives storage cards and disks, I recently had an issue where one of my directors had plugged a brand new (sealed) USB drive into his laptop copied a couple of spreadsheets onto the drive to transfer them to his desktop PC.
On plugging the USB drive into his main pc our security (NOD32 by Eset) kicked in and locked down a ‘known threat’ this was kind of disturbing as I knew the drive was brand new (i gave it to him sealed) It seems the code that was infecting the drive was silently installing from his unprotected laptop and writing hidden files that executed the next time it was plugged into any machine. After some headscratching and scanning we got to the root of the problem and disinfected all machines/drives affected.
this took me on to read the following article which was again quite shocking:
Viruses found in photo frames, chargers
Computer viruses are so clever they are always finding new ways to break into our computers.
Over the past few weeks viruses have been spread to computers from digital photo frames, battery chargers and even brand new smart phones.
What all of the devices have in common is that they are plugged into the USB port of your computer, which gives the virus an opportunity to go forth and multiply to cause havoc.
In the case of the phone it was found to contain no less than three viruses, including a Mariposa bot virus which “phones home” for more instructions once it lands in a computer.
No less an authority than the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team put out a warning about a common USB battery charger which came with optional software that contained a Trojan that allowed a hacker to remotely control a computer.
It is not known how many users have been infected by that software, which may have been around for three years.
The photo frames suffer from a similar back door hacker entry problem, which seems to stem from a period in which the viruses were particularly active around the world.
None of the distribution was wilful and stemmed from infected computers in the manufacturer accidentally passing on the viruses.
“This may simply be from that time frame when all the factories in China were not clean and many were putting malware on to stuff, not intentionally but because the hygiene wasn’t good,” said Marcus Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Centre.
“Who knows where the server (hosting the software) is located. It could have been exposed to the unclean conditions that were rampant there.”
Fortunately most good virus protection programs seem to pick up and eradicate these threats because they have long been identified as a problem.
These examples do show how careful you need to be with any device that can be plugged into a computer.
Article from: News.com.au
Be aware that everything you can attach to a computer can be affected by malicious code keep you AV solution up to date (as well as your operating system!)
It seems there is battle happening inside my iMac between Adobe Fireworks and Snow Leopard OS! Initially I presumed it was probably my lack of re-booting/updating that was causing the problem so I carried out the necessary updates (480mb!) for my CS4 design package, re-booted the iMac and hoped for the best.
I though as I had dismissed 480mb worth of updates for a while that was the most likely thing to be at the root of this problem. Wrong! Fireworks still hangs when I try to start it, and displays the not so helpful message “an internal error has occurred”. So off I go to the Adobe support site where I stumbled on a blog by one of their own developers that works for Adobe Systems on the Fireworks Engineering team.
http://blogs.adobe.com/sarthak/2009/09/fireworks_and_snow_leopard.html
The 1st post in this thread was back in September 09 the most recent is from less than a week ago with around 90 comments on the post! Adobe need to address this issue. I will be checking this error at home this evening as im in the office right now (but do have a new 27″ iMac at home).
Pretty poor support from a company of this size in my opinion!
WordPress is an excellent CMS and I have used it on most of the projects that I have worked on recently. The one thing however that can be a little tricky is multi-level page menus, when you have got several levels of parent/sub pages. Whilst working on a large project recently I have come across a pretty good way of getting round this problem.
I was working on a site that required a multi-level page navigation system. This primarily meant that when viewing a page the child pages of that page would need to be displayed in the sites sidebar. (more…)
Today I spent much of the day teaching about using Vector tools in Adobe Fireworks CS3 (yes we are out of date a little!). My aim was to create an avatar character to represent you as a person, or perhaps what you would call a caricature using Fireworks, to express the benefits of using the vector tools rather than relying on bitmap tools all the time. This post is to tell you how I got on!
Inspriation
I started out looking for inspiration, as I am sure all designers do. I have never been an artist and probably never will be and therefore when it comes to drawing something I need all the help I can get. (more…)
I have been coding websites now since late 2004, and I have learnt a lot in the time that I have been doing this. In fact every day you learn things that you didn’t know, and a long the way I have learnt so much from others. However the one thing that no one passed on to me was the importance of clean coding. This is something that I had to learn for myself. So what do I mean by clean coding and how does it help when creating a website?
Many beginners often use Web Editor programs such as Adobe Dreamweaver to create their websites, however as time has gone I have found it easier and easier to code the sites using a code editor rather than a WYSYWYG solution. It is only then do you start to appreciate the need to clean code. (more…)
Finally last week Steve Jobs, Apple CEO announced the launch of Apple’s brand new product, the Apple iPad. Rumours have been developing for months now on the Internet and now that the product has finally been revealed is it a good as all the hype built it up to be or should we be disappointed? Well a little of both maybe, so lets have a look.
My first disappointment was that it was exactly the product that everyone had been suggesting with the rumours. Therefore Apple either did a really bad job of keeping it a secret or they were not that bothered about it leaking in the first place. (more…)
I have been working on a number of sites recently that require several of the pages to be protected to logged in users only. Also I have had one site where all pages which have a particular parent page needed protecting to logged in users only. With some very handy built in WordPress functions and a bit of PHP this post attempts to show you how this can be done.
Ribbweb ICT runs WordPress and is used as a CMS in order to provide online resources for students to use. It was decided that the site needed a section for just teachers to be able to use, where they can post protected content such as lesson plans, notes etc that website visitors cannot see but logged in users can. (more…)
I regularly check CSS Mania, which is a website that showcases excellent design in terms of CSS driven websites. I would like to use this post to showcase three sites that I have recently seen that I find excellent examples. All of these sites are websites that showcase web design services and each one provides excellent examples of how to do it. (more…)
For a while now WordPress has had the functionality for you to add dynamic classes to your posts and pages. So what are dynamic classes, how do they work and how can they help you when creating a website using WordPress? In this post I will try to answer these questions and more.
Dynamic means change and that is exactly what WordPress’ dynamic classes do. If you add them to a post then they will change depending on which post your are looking at. Lets take a look at some of the code for this site to give you an example. Each post on this site is wrapped in a div tag with the class ‘post’. (more…)
Everyone seems to be using Twitter at the moment and it was with this in mind that I decided to include in this site the “Tweet this Post” icon that you can see to the right of each post title. What is a little different about this Tweet This button is that instead of using one of the many URL shortening services, it uses WordPress functionality to keep the shortened URL on your own domain name. This post with talk you though how I did this.
First of all it is nothing complicated. The WordPress default permalink structure is always much shorter than the pretty permalink version of your URLs and therefore I thought why not use this when adding link to Twitter. The problem is, is that you don’t want to change your permalink structure of your site just so that you can use the links in Twitter. The great thing is, is that you don’t have to. (more…)